“Hard keeping my mouth sewn shut about this one,” Ryan Reynolds wrote on Twitter, and with that, in a surprise video, the actor announced, “Deadpool 3” finally has a release date: September 6, 2024. Moreover, Reynolds announced that Hugh Jackman would reprise his role as the X-men Wolverine one for the Marvel movie.
“Hey everyone, we’re extremely sad to have missed D23, but we’ve been working very hard on the next ‘Deadpool’ film for a good long while now,” Reynolds explains in the video, referencing the D23 Disney Expo in early September that featured several Marvel announcements. “I’ve had to really search my soul on this one. His first appearance in the MCU obviously needs to feel special. We need to stay true to the character, find new depth, motivation, meaning. Every ‘Deadpool’ needs to stand out and stand apart. It’s been an incredible challenge that has forced me to reach down deep inside. And I…I have nothing. Yeah, just completely empty up here. And terrifying. But we did have one idea.”
“Hey, Hugh, you want to play Wolverine one more time?” Reynolds asks as Hugh Jackman walks up a set of stairs in the background.
“Yeah, sure, Ryan,” Jackman replies. From there, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” a “Coming Hughn” teaser, and boom, the Deadpool sliced up by Wolverine’s adamantium claws to seal the deal on a long-running gag that’s now coming to life.
To fans, this is immense. For one, it’ll have been six years between “Deadpool” movies. “Deadpool 2” came out in 2018, and Disney acquired Fox not that long afterward. But incorporating Deadpool into the MCU apparently took time. For two, Jackman had said he was done with playing Wolverine after the 2017 swansong “Logan.” But Reynolds— who appeared as an earlier version of Deadpool in the much-maligned “X-Men: Origins: Wolverine”— had made something of a running joke over the years to try and include Jackman in some Deadpool shenanigans. Hell, at the end of “Deadpool 2,” Reynolds made that clear with a time-traveling meta post-credit sequence that used footage of himself and Jackman from the aforementioned “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” pleading with Wolverine to heed the call to join a modern Deadpool movie eventually (watch it below). But now, this clever meta-joke is a reality.
After all the jokes and the constant needling, Ryan apparently convinced Jackman to return to the character one final time and into the MCU for the first time. Plot details are unknown, but clearly, they involve Logan now (remember years back when Reynolds joked that “Deadpool 3” was originally intended to be a road trip movie with him and Wolverine??)
The film is to be directed by Shawn Levy (“Stranger Things,” “The Adam Project”), who also weighed in about finding it hard to keep the secret in what sounds like a very recent development. Levy and Adams are tight now, and the filmmaker’s already directed him in “Free Guy” and “The Adam Project.” Levy also directed Jackman in 2011’s “Real Steel,” so perhaps the tag-teaming of two friends trying to convince Jackman to join the threequel finally worked. The film is being written by “Deadpool” and “Deadpool 2” writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, so it will be a team Deadpool family affair again.
Moments after the video, Disney made it official, confirming “The Untitled Deadpool Movie,” which they are referring to, for now, is coming September 6, 2024. That’s a release date made possible by the success of “Shang Chi And The Legend of The Ten Rings,” a movie that came out during a similar frame in 2021 and was something of a surprise success, at least, given how unpopular Labor Day/September releases have been for blockbusters in the past.
Watch the announcement video below.
You’ll remember Reynolds made this joke years ago. Maybe there was some truth to it?
Also, did John Krasinski confirm his return as Richard Reed from the Fantastic Four in the film??