Deadpool & Wolverine Almost Featured A Connection To Marvel's Worst-Reviewed Movie

With "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally got Marvel's first family right after four previously underwhelming attempts to bring the characters to the big screen. Well, mostly underwhelming. Josh Trank's 2015 box office flop "Fantastic Four" might better be described as a historic disaster — and it seems Ryan Reynolds was initially keen to revisit that flop with 2024's "Deadpool & Wolverine."

The hugely successful team-up between Reynolds' Merc with a Mouth and Hugh Jackman's Logan was, when it came down to it, basically onelong cameo-fest, featuring everyone from Wesley Snipes' Blade to Chris Evan's Johnny Storm from "Fantastic Four" and "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer." But according to Reynolds, there were ambitions to include more former Fantastic Four members in the form of Miles Teller's Reed Richards, Kate Mara's Sue Storm, Michael B. Jordan's Johnny Storm, and Jamie Bell's Ben Grimm from 2015's "Fantastic Four." 

Unfortunately for this forgotten big screen superhero team, they didn't make the cut due to several factors. Speaking to Collider, Reynolds confirmed that he'd originally wanted to bring back the 2015 team but that he quickly had to abandon the idea, in part due to the fact they already had Chris Evans' version of Johnny Storm in the movie — which served as one of the film's biggest misdirects. "You're never going to get the mislead with like, Chris Evans, you know," Reynolds explained, adding that Evans gave he and director Shawn Levy a "license to thrill." Beyond that, budget concerns were also a big part of the decision to drop the Trank team.

Amid the cavalcade of guest appearances, "Deadpool & Wolverine" features one of Marvel Studios' biggest stars, Chris Evans. When he first appears in the film, fans are led to believe he's playing his most famous role: Steve Rogers/Captain America. But it's quickly revealed that the actor is actually portraying his version of Johnny Storm from the early 2000s "Fantastic Four" films, in one of the more successful surprises in all of "Deadpool & Wolverine." Including a separate Fantastic Four team would have lessened the impact. But it seems that wasn't the only thing holding the Trank troop back, as Ryan Reynolds was also worried about his movie's budget.

The actor, who's often heralded as some sort of marketing genius, is pretty much guaranteed to figure out a way to make his movies (and multiple companies) successful. But in "Deadpool & Wolverine" Reynolds was playing a character that has long been close to the his heart, and was therefore even more invested in ensuring the movie was a hit. As such, he wanted to make sure he could deliver, and bringing back the cast of Josh Trank's ill-fated film just didn't add up in the end. "We were trying to be mindful of the budget," Reynolds told Collider. "We were trying to make the movie. We always understood it's rated R, you know. It isn't a blank check, and part of our responsibility is to return the investment that they're making in us." 

With Reynolds somewhat restricted by the R-rating, he knew he had to balance the fun of cameos against the risk of hurting the movie's profit potential. With that in mind, it seems he didn't want to push for more cameos than he thought was fair. "I never want a budget that I don't feel like I can make good on," he continued. "And the more kind of toys you start asking for and the more kind of characters you start wanting to license, the deeper in that sort of point of no return becomes."

"Deadpool & Wolverine" is absolutely packed with cameos, to the point that stuffing it with guest stars seemed to be of more importance than actually telling a story. But when your movie makes $1.3 billion, clearly you're doing something right. That' something' in this case was giving the fans what they wanted. "Deadpool & Wolverine" dominated the box office, offering an undeniably crowd-pleasing experience that seemed perfectly engineered to embrace audience capture and appeal to every fans' cameo dreams.

That's pretty much the exact opposite of 2015's "Fantastic Four," which disappointed both fans and critics across the board. The movie currently has a score of 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on a whopping 260 reviews. That's significantly lower than the lowest-rated MCU movie, "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania" with 46%. Heck, it's lower than the disaster that was the unreleased 1994 "Fantastic Four" movie. Phrases like "Beyond depressing," "shameful," and "a 100-minute trailer for a movie that never happens" were thrown around by critics upon the release of 2015's "Fantastic Four," and the movie seemed to have killed off any hope of Marvel's first family ever getting a decent cinematic outing.

Revisiting such a downer of a movie might not have been the best idea for a film designed to be as crowd-pleasing as possible. While "Deadpool & Wolverine" was partly intended to give the Fox era of Marvel and its characters a proper send-off, and highlight forgotten heroes, it seems the Josh Trank-directed Fantastic Four team would have been a step too far in that direction. Whereas a character like Wesley Snipes' Blade remains beloved among fans who remember his excellent 1998 debut, the lack of fan support for Trank's Fantastic Four ensemble — especially when compared to the former X-Men actors, for example — means it's not hard to see why Ryan Reynolds was inclined to focus on other cameos.