SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers about multiple surprise developments in Deadpool 2, in theaters now. So if are avoiding spoilers in any sort of way, please check out one of the many other fine articles on this site.


OK, so you've seen Deadpool 2? Well, about $18.6 million of you watched 20th Century Fox's David Leitch-directed Marvel-based film on Thursday night, breaking a record for Thursday night previews. So you've probably got questions about some of the major developments: How did they sneak the Juggernaut in there? How did they sneak Brad Pitt in there? Why did they decide to kill nearly all of X-Force instantly? What went into the decision to kill Vanessa -- and the decision to bring her back?

And oh yeah -- what inspired that mid-credits scene which climaxed in Deadpool killing none other than Ryan Reynolds himself, to prevent him from starring in 2011's Green Lantern?

RELATED: Deadpool 2 Hides a Cameo By Another Major Actor

Earlier this week at the film's press junket in New York City, CBR went straight to the source -- Deadpool 2 screenwriters and executive producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick -- to get the scoop on all of the above and more, including definitive clarification on the identity of the mutant played by Shioli Kutsuna, insight on Cable's powers and the original plans for Jack Kesy's Black Tom Cassidy.

Colossus-Deadpool-2

CBR: Let’s talk about some of the fun surprises in the movie -- I'll start with Juggernaut. Was that always part of the plan? Did you always know you'd be able to use that character?

Rhett Reese: We committed to it pretty early on, because he's never been done justice until now. We always wanted to see a CG Juggernaut, so we finally got that. We also really needed to balance the scales in act three, between Deadpool and friends and little Firefist who has cool powers, but we needed to make it a fair fight. What greater force of nature than Juggernaut?

Ryan Reynolds ended up voicing Juggernaut, if you didn't know that. That was Ryan's voice as the Juggernaut, and he did the facial capture for him. I don't know how they did the physical mo-cap -- I don't think that was Ryan.

But in any case, it came together really fun. It also gave us a chance for him to fight Colossus. Two big behemoths going at it in act three is never a bad thing.

Another major addition to the franchise is Cable -- in this film, we see him using technology, but not necessarily any mutant powers. Is it an open question at this point if he's a mutant or not?

Reese: I think it is a little of an open question. We're going to explore Cable more moving forward, we just didn't want to overload it. We did have versions of the script where he was using telekinesis, and it just became -- suddenly he was Force-hurling stuff, it felt like Star Wars. We just decided to dial it back. Let's keep it about technology. Let's not overwhelm the audience.

Paul Wernick: Though he does have the gun fly...

Reese: But even that feels like it's a technology means, as opposed to maybe he's using his mind to do it.

It's just a fine line to making him complex and interesting and not overloading an audience with crazy backstory, and the techno-organic virus, which we'll get into hopefully in the future, and those kinds of things. We're just kind of riding that line.

Wernick: It could be a little overwhelming, I think, for a mainstream audience, so we wanted to keep it simple and relatable. You've got this time traveler from the future who's trying to save his family, I think was the core of who Cable was in a Deadpool 2 movie. Moving forward in X-Force, my guess is that will be explored further and better, and we'll get more backstory as to who he is and what his powers are.

He’s definitely one of the most complicated characters in comics -- we haven’t even mentioned the Cyclops connection.

Wernick: I challenge someone who hasn't read the comics to read Cable's Wikipedia page and explain it to me.

Reese: It's impossible.

Wernick: Impossible.

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Wanted to clear up some confusion about the character played by Shioli Kutsuna -- given her powers, a lot of fans have connected her to the Surge character in X-Men comics, and presumed that to be her identity.

Reese: That's not right. She's a super-minor character. The character's name is actually Yukio, an assassin -- but who's an adult assassin, so we just aged her down. She's such a minor character, we thought we could pretty much get away with anything.

And Shioli's amazing. I really think we have to do her more justice going forward -- not as though we did her injustice, but she just didn't have a lot of screen time. I'd love to explore the Yukio character more.

Wernick: Fox has a bible of all 400-plus characters that they have rights to. We generally, when we're building out a movie, look at that list, and kind of go through and go, "Oh yeah, yes, yes, no, love that name, oh those powers are cool," and we build that cast that way. Yukio jumped out at us as just a character we would love to see further explored.

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Speaking of a known character that is definitely in the movie -- Black Tom Cassidy a major X-Men villain that we hadn’t seen before in live action.

Reese: There was a a much grander version of him in an earlier script where he actually lives until the end of act three, and he becomes the devil on Firefist's shoulder, trying to get him to turn bad.

Wernick: He was essentially the villain. There was a script where he was the primary villain of the movie.

Reese: But we thought we were overstuffing the movie a little bit with too many antagonists, too many villains. And also budgetarily, it was very, very expensive, because his powers are to move organic material around -- the entire orphanage, and the trees, everything was flying around, and the hailstorms of wood -- it was really cool, but it was also really, really expensive, and we just thought, we prefer to throw that money to the CG of Juggernaut as opposed to Black Tom. So he got reduced -- and then killed, which I know a lot of people are probably going to be upset about, but we can always go back in time and make anybody alive, so perhaps he'll come back. Jack did a great job with the character in limited time. That was Black Tom's role, and it did reduce a little bit, unfortunately.

That’s a character with a definite history with Deadpool in the comics -- and Juggernaut.

Reese: Yeah, I know. I know. We killed him a little too quickly.

RELATED: Every X-Man in Deadpool 2 (Including the Ones You Missed)

Another surprise appearance, so to speak, is the Vanisher, who turned out to be Brad Pitt when he was finally seen. What inspired that? Just the visual gag?

Reese: Truly, that was it!

Wernick: We just thought, how fun would it be? They don't know that the guy's actually in the room, or is he in the room? With the parachute and so forth. The Brad Pitt cameo was actually very, very late in post process. It was the last thing we shot on the Fox lot.

Reese: The very last footage we shot in the movie was of Brad. He basically said, "I'll do it for scale and a cup of Starbucks -- but Ryan's got to go get the Starbucks for me." So Ryan's literally delivering the Starbucks to Brad. It was so funny. Two A-list superstars getting coffee together and working for scale. It was pretty fun.

Did that stem from the reports that Brad Pitt was interested in playing Cable?

Wernick: We had talked to Brad about being Cable at one point, and ultimately we're so happy that Josh came aboard. But I think Brad's kids are big Deadpool fans, so he jumped at the chance to be a part of it in any form or fashion.

People are buzzing about the mid-credits scene as being one of the best ever -- how did that develop? Was it always something that was in the script?

Reese: It wasn't. The first screenings of the movie we do without any coda, so people saw the movie, and they were happy with it.

Wernick: We hadn't shot the coda.

Reese: We shoot it in additional photography, because we generally like to look at the whole movie and see how it plays out before we decide what we want to do at the end.

We had another idea that was in there for a while, which was, he was going to do some more X-Force interviews. He was going to open it up, and we had this bit where Chris Evans walked in, and then of course he treats him as Johnny Storm instead of Captain America, which we thought was really funny.

Long story short, when it came down to it, someone had the idea for the time machine, and we just thought, “Oh, that’s just too classic.” How meta can it be when Ryan Reynolds is going back in time to stop previous Ryan Reynolds from taking the Green Lantern movie? When Ryan had that idea of the Green Lantern bit, because he’s so willing to make fun of himself, we just lost it. We thought, that’s the funniest idea ever, and what a great idea to end the movie.

Originally it ended with Deadpool killing baby Hitler. At the very, very end of the credits, we had him going and killing an infant version of Hitler. Then we decided that was a little too harsh— not killing Hitler, but killing a baby.

No matter what, it’s hard to sell the comedy of that.

Reese: Exactly.

Wernick: You can’t really walk out of that movie going, “I had a good time. That was amazing!”

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So does that mean the decision to save Vanessa also came later?

Reese: Yeah. We originally did not save her. It was interesting — we thought we might have to save her with the time machine, because the audience would be mad at us, but they were accepting of her being dead.

Wernick: Her story has a beginning, middle and end, so I feel like while we do kill her in the first act, we do keep her “alive” throughout the movie, with the afterlife. Again, as it was in the first one, that relationship really is the emotional core of the movie. We feel like the audiences weren’t cheated of that relationship, because despite her death, it travels through.

Reese: Now we can bring her back as Copycat, and Morena [Baccarin] was very thrilled when she got the call. “We got the time machine working, and you’re still alive!” “I knew it!” It was really funny.

Wernick: When we told her that she was dying in this one, she was like, “Oh, man.”

Reese: She did take it great, though. She said, in the back of her mind, “I know no one’s ever really necessary dead in a comic book movie. They could be back.”

morena baccarin

Wanted to ask if that was a tough decision.

Reese: It was.

The reality is, there aren’t a ton of female characters in these movies, and to take one off the board, especially one that’s very well-liked…

Wernick: There were drafts of her film that had them breaking up, and not her death. But we always felt it was important to get Deadpool at his lowest early on, take everything away from him, and build him back up. It was a difficult decision, but one, story-wise, that we felt we had to make. And then we got to have our cake and eat it too by bringing her back to life at the very end.

RELATED: How Deadpool 2 Sets Up Fox’s X-Force Movie

Moving to several deaths that I’m sure was an easier decision — that X-Force sequence. What inspired that premise? How did you come about in using those characters, which balanced being believable enough to promote them as part of the film, but also expendable enough that you could kill them off so quickly?

Reese: Shatterstar helped, because he was an original member of X-Force. I think that’s the one that made people think, “OK, this is legit.” Also, we had actors who were really generous, and they were willing to shoot footage that they knew and we knew wasn’t going to end up in the movie, but was only going to be in marketing material. So we had Terry Crews out there fighting stunt guys, knowing that it was only going to be in commercials — and we did use it, it’s in commercials and it’s in trailers. It was all to help mislead the audience on this big gag. It was very elaborately constructed to make sure people bought it.

Wernick: There was a moment in time we were going to do standees, their own posters, we were going all in on this idea.

Reese: We were really going to try and convince people that they were going to be alive so that nobody sniffed it. And I think it worked, in the sense that nobody sees that coming.

In the very back of our mind, we did have the time machine in our heads, saying if we really need to resurrect Shatterstar, if people are that upset that he’s going, we can do it. Peter, for example, we knew people were going to love Peter — we maybe want to use Peter moving forward in some fashion. When Delaney found out that Peter was going to get to come back, he was like, “OK, bring me back! Let’s do it!” We recreated that moment on the street where he’s about to go save Zeitgeist and gets killed. We were on a studio, we created this fake patch of grass, we weren’t on the same street, and there he did his, “I’m just going to go home! Can you give me Domino’s email address?” That was fun.

Were there characters you wanted to use in X-Force that you couldn’t?

Reese: No, everything was available to us.

Wernick: Spider-Man. [Laughs]

Reese: Well, post-merger, we may get our wish there. Or Spider-Man will be using Deadpool.

I’m so bummed — I want Chris Evans to stay Captain America forever, because I just want to see Deadpool and Captain America doing stuff together, but I don’t think that dream will come true.

Catch up with all of CBR's Deadpool 2 coverage!