Was Deadpool Almost Left Out of Marvel vs Capcom 3?

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and eightieth week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week's Deadpool-themed legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's Deadpool-themed legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Deadpool was nearly omitted from Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

STATUS:

Apparently True

Nowadays, when people "hear" Deadpool's voice in their heads, it is generally Ryan Reynolds, after the movie star starred in two blockbuster films starring the Merc with the Mouth. However, for years, the voice that people most associated with Deadpool was voice over artist Nolan North.

This is because North was the voice of Deadpool in 2010's Marvel vs. Capcom 3...

It is hard to overstate just how important Deadpool's appearance in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was to the popularity of Deadpool, as it opened the character up to a whole new audience. You see, Deadpool was rarely given prominent attention in licensed material since he was a bit too much of an "adult" character, so even when he was first introduced into video games, it was as an unlockable character and not an initial one.

Thus, for a lot of kids, their first exposure to Deadpool was through the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 video game and Deadpool's sense of humor went over REALLY well with the audience of the video game...

No less of a Deadpool authority than his creator himself, Rob Liefeld, talked to EW last year about the importance of this video game to Deadpool's mainstream appeal...

"It started with Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, where you could unlock Deadpool. Then he’s a boss on Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. Then, and this is when I really saw Deadpool explode, was Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Deadpool was the favorite character. I would come home on the weekends and my giant leather couches would be full of kids, all fighting to see who would be next, and everyone’s playing Deadpool vs. Deadpool. That’s when I saw Deadpool’s awareness expand."

However, amazingly enough, Deadpool almost missed out on appearing in the game entirely!

Capcom, as you may or may not know, is a Japanese video game company. Thus, when they interacted with Marvel on the licensing involved in the video game pairing Marvel characters with Capcom's own stable of famous characters, they had to deal with translators. That ended up being a really big deal down the line.

Anyhow, Capcom obviously had to deal with what Marvel wanted to see in the game from their perspective, and part of that was if Marvel told them that a character was a no go, the character was removed from the game. A notable example of this is when Capcom did the updated version of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3), and Venom was made off-limits. As a Capcom representative explained, “Venom, unfortunately, was amongst a list of characters that were not available for us to use on Marvel’s side. I couldn’t tell you the reason for why that is…you’d have to ask Marvel. But Venom was never an option.”

Amusingly enough, Shuma-Gorath was another character Marvel said no to, but in that case, Capcom argued back that they really wanted to use Shuma-Gorath, so Marvel ultimately relented, but the character has to be a downloadable character.

In any event, at one point, Deadpool was on Marvel's list of "no go" characters.

However, Ryota Niitsuma explained to IGN's Ryan Clements that a translator was shocked that such a cool character was on Marvel's "no go" list, so the translator looked into it and discovered that it was a translation error! So Deadpool made the list after all.

Can you even imagine how differently things would be if Deadpool wasn't in that game?

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - How was Taskmaster almost in the first Deadpool film?

OK, that's it for this week!

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