If you follow superhero movie news closely, you’re probably aware that writer/producer Simon Kinberg is pretty heavily involved in 20th Century Fox’s superhero universe. He wrote and produced X-Men: Future Past and the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse in addition to co-writing and producing Fantastic Four, and he’s also producing Gambit and Deadpool, the latter of which is probably the most buzzworthy upcoming superhero property at Fox right now—and rightfully so.
The very R-rated Deadpool trailer landed online to overwhelmingly positive response last month, and both fans and the uninitiated alike are curious to see what this edgy antihero movie is all about. When Steve recently sat down with Kinberg at the Toronto International Film Festival to talk about The Martian (which Kinberg produced), they also broached the topic of the Deadpool rough cut that Kinberg just saw and whether there’s been internal talks of a sequel just yet:
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“I have seen a rough cut of Deadpool and it’s fantastic. It’s a really good movie. It delivers on the promise of the trailer… We really committed and leaned into it being R-rated. It’s just darker and edgier and weirder in the best way—like Deadpool should be—than any other movie in the genre.”
With regards to the follow-up, Kinberg confirms they began talking about sequel ideas while on set, but cautions that he's unaware of any studio decisions already made about Deadpool 2:
“We certainly are talking about the sequel—we were talking about the sequel while we were making the movie just because when you make a film like this that’s from a serialized source material, you hope that it’s the first of many… But yeah [Fox is] feeling good about it, we’re all feeling really proud of it, so hopefully before it comes out we will be well into the process of figuring out a sequel.”
Deadpool director Tim Miller previously hinted that comics character Cable will hopefully be popping up in Deadpool 2, so Steve asked Kinberg if they’ve been talking about using the character:
“It’s certainly come up because he’s such a big character in the world. And it’s a character that I’ve always wanted to do in one form or another, we talked about Cable actually in Days of Future Past at one point. But yeah we’re in such the early stages of sequel talk it would be genuinely premature for me to say whether or not he was gonna be in it.”
So while Deadpool is still a few months away (it opens on February 4, 2016), it sounds like everyone at Fox is very high on the prospects of continuing this franchise. And because Deadpool was produced on a relatively small budget compared to other superhero properties, the success threshold to warrant the greenlight of a sequel is lower. Here’s hoping folks turn out in February so we can see the continuing adventures of Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with a mouth.
Look for Steve’s full interview with Kinberg on Collider soon, and click here to catch up on all of our coverage from the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
