Everything we've been hearing out of the pre-production of 20th Century Fox's Deadpool sequel had sounded great until late last night. It turns out that some creative differences between director Tim Miller and star/producer Ryan Reynolds have led to the former exiting the picture. As Deadline reports, the split was amicable, but it's an unfortunate turn of events for the team that brought audiences one of the wildest and most-successful adaptations in the superhero genre to date.

There are few details at this time as to what exactly those differences were, but considering that Reynolds is not only the (scarred) face of the franchise and that he's also a producer on the project, he clearly wields a lot of power behind the scenes. There's also no mention of a replacement at the moment, so we'll keep an ear out for potential candidates. It'll be tough to replicate the original movie's success regardless of who Fox and the producers choose, but the decision will be quite telling for how the eventual sequel might pan out: Will they pick a veteran director with a particularly quirky vision that jibes with the rest of the creative team, or will they opt for a pushover who will do whatever Reynolds and the writers want? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, it's not all bad for Miller. The VFX wiz who kept Deadpool's budget way down thanks to some clever filmmaking moves made his directorial debut with the Marvel antihero movie, but he's now shifted to another project at Fox. He'll now head up the in-development title Influx, an adaptation of author Daniel Suarez's best-selling cyber-thriller novel of the same name; Mark Bomback (War for the Planet of the Apes) penned the adaptation. Here's a look at the book's synopsis (via Amazon):

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Image via Amazon

The New York Times bestselling author of Daemon--"the cyberthriller against which all others will be measured" -Publishers Weekly) --imagines a world in which decades of technological advances have been suppressed in an effort to prevent disruptive change.

 

Are smart phones really humanity's most significant innovation since the moon landings? Or can something else explain why the bold visions of the 20th century--fusion power, genetic enhancements, artificial intelligence, cures for common disease, extended human life, and a host of other world-changing advances--have remained beyond our grasp? Why has the high-tech future that seemed imminent in the 1960's failed to arrive?

 

Perhaps it did arrive...but only for a select few.

 

Particle physicist Jon Grady is ecstatic when his team achieves what they've been working toward for years: a device that can reflect gravity. Their research will revolutionize the field of physics--the crowning achievement of a career. Grady expects widespread acclaim for his entire team. The Nobel. Instead, his lab is locked down by a shadowy organization whose mission is to prevent at all costs the social upheaval sudden technological advances bring. This Bureau of Technology Control uses the advanced technologies they have harvested over the decades to fulfill their mission.

 

They are living in our future.

 

Presented with the opportunity to join the BTC and improve his own technology in secret, Grady balks, and is instead thrown into a nightmarish high-tech prison built to hold rebellious geniuses like himself. With so many great intellects confined together, can Grady and his fellow prisoners conceive of a way to usher humanity out of its artificial dark age?

 

And when they do, is it possible to defeat an enemy that wields a technological advantage half a century in the making?

As far as we know, Deadpool 2 is still aiming for its January 12, 2018 release date. We'll provide future updates as they're made available. For more on Deadpool, take a look at some of our recent write-ups regarding the Merc with a Mouth:

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