Ryan Reynolds joined his “Deadpool & Wolverine” co-star Hugh Jackman on the latest episode of “Hot Ones” and revealed a wild scrapped plan for their Marvel tentpole. Reynolds said that he was “shocked that we managed to get through” the making of “Deadpool & Wolverine” without “some of our biggest surprises” leaking online. While a lot of the pre-release buzz on the movie has been devoted to the cameos in the movie, Reynolds dropped an even bigger bombshell about his first plan for the film.
“The original idea with this movie was to shoot a fake movie called ‘Alpha Cop,’ that was intentionally bad…I even had one of the posters made. It was about two guys that were sharing one brain and together they make the perfect cop.”
Reynolds said the poster tagline for “Alpha Cop” read: “Two cops, one brain, all balls.”
The idea appears to have been to cast Reynolds and Jackman in the fake movie “Alpha Cop” and have them film “Deadpool & Wolverine” instead in secret. The fake movie would be promoted and then audiences would get the bait and switch of a lifetime in the theater.
“It was meant to be kind of like horrible,” Reynolds said of the fake movie. “Like 10 people in America would go to see this movie on opening weekend and five minutes into the movie the Marvel logo would flip up and it would actually be ‘Deadpool & Wolverine.’ The problem is that if you managed to get down to the last minute and it got blown, it would just be heartbreaking.”
Shooting an entire Marvel movie in secret might would probably be an impossible undertaking, although Reynolds and the “Deadpool & Wolverine” team did manage to film their tentpole without some of the biggest cameo surprises leaking. Executive producer Wendy Jacobson already let it slip to GamesRadar+ that the studio planted fake leaks online and in-person “in order to protect the secrecy” of the cameos in the finished movie.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” director Shawn Levy told Entertainment Weekly earlier this month that there are lots of cameos in his movie, but he stressed that the team behind the Marvel tentpole “didn’t want any of the cameos or characters to be the story of the movie. But they are peppered in throughout.”
Watch Reynolds and Jackman’s full interview on “Hot Ones” in the video below. “Deadpool & Wolverine” opens in theaters July 26.