Now that the film has been out for nearly a month, there is much to discuss when it comes to “Deadpool & Wolverine.” From its many cameos to its surprisingly emotional farewell to the Marvel universes of old, it’s a big movie with a lot going on. It’s also still very much a “Deadpool” movie with lots of R-rated shenanigans, fourth wall-breaking, and quips from Ryan Reynolds. So much of that blended together to make the film’s climactic battle sequence, which sees Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in his iconic yellow costume, mask and all, battling an army of Deadpool Corps. variants. It was by far the most complicated sequence in the whole movie.
Director Shawn Levy recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly, breaking down what it took to make that big “Deadpool & Wolverine” climax happen. The scene set to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” went through many iterations and has a lot of moving parts. Levy explained that putting it together took many months of exhaustive preparation:
“That is the single most complicated shot in the movie. It’s the most complicated shot I have ever done in any movie, and, frankly, it’s more complicated than most shots any of us will ever see in any movie. It took nine months of preparation, starting with the idea, which was always one laterally-tracking shot, always left to right, always in our mind set to ‘Like a Prayer.’ It aspired to be an ecstatic symphony of violence. It started with storyboards. Those evolved into pre-visualization, where you animate the storyboards. Then the next big hurdle was, let’s get 50 stunt people and figure out how we’re going to do this with real humans and bodies in space because those are not digi-doubles. Those are real fighters the whole way through.”
There was also one more big problem. “What happens when you rehearse no longer in sweats but in the suits?” Levy posited. “The body doesn’t move the same way. It took hundreds of teammates to figure it out and pull it off. It’s one of our great prides.”
Shawn Levy let the best idea win on Deadpool & Wolverine
The script for “Deadpool & Wolverine” evolved a lot along the way, as various elements came and went. Throughout that process, Levy was open to ideas from, not just Reynolds or the writers, but anyone who had one worth listening to. To that end, it was a certain storyboard artist who helped make the bus portion of this fight sequence what it is. The director elaborated:
“I do want to give credit to the entire section in the bus through that shot. That was our storyboard artist, Jeremy Simser. That bus section and the idea of the windows getting increasingly obscured with blood splatter, that was Jeremy. I mention it because I really think the key to directing is to be loose enough that you are open to the best possible idea regardless of where it comes from. I am a great beneficiary of tremendous creativity from the whole team.
Much of the magic had to be coordinated carefully, meaning there wasn’t a lot of room for improv on the day. That said, there was still room for a little bit of riffing by Reynolds to help make the scene just a little bit better. Levy recalled:
“The one thing that I recall being a later add is Ryan fumbling and tapping off this glorious epic action sequence with a very clumsy dismount, and then Deadpool commenting on his God-awful dismount because we could have just ended it with superhero glory, but somehow that’s not quite Deadpool. You always want to zig when the expectation is for the genre to zag.”
It’s all worked out quite well, to put it lightly. The film recently topped “Joker” to become the biggest R-rated movie ever at the box office. It’s made well over $1 billion worldwide and is second only to “Inside Out 2” at the box office in 2024. Audiences are eating it up and all of that hard work has paid off handsomely.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” is in theaters now.