Before it became the action-comedy you’ll be seeing later tonight and throughout the weekend, Deadpool & Wolverine almost took on many different forms: an indie road trip, a musical, a “Rashomon“—all of them shot down along the way. According to Ryan Reynolds, another one of those unused ideas was to smuggle the movie in under a different name and pull a fast one on the audience.
Recently, Reynolds and Jackman popped over to “Hot Ones” to eat wings and chat it up, as one does. During the interview, Reynolds described plans to film and promote a fake movie called Alpha Cop that would act as a smokescreen for Deadpool & Wolverine.
Said movie would’ve been “intentionally bad” and been about two cops (presumably, he’d play one of them?) who share the same brain. Its hypothetical slogan: “Alpha Cop. Two cops. One brain. All balls.” And early into the film, it’d be revealed as a gag before playing Deadpool & Wolverine in full.
“Ten people in America would go to see this Alpha on opening weekend,” explained Reynolds. The idea got killed for pretty clear reasons: once someone discovered what the movie actually was, there’d just be no way to keep that secret for too long. “If you manage to get right down to the last minute, and [the reveal] gets blown, it would be heartbreaking,” the star said. Probably not as disappointing to him as last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine leaks, or at least the ones Marvel didn’t apparently fake to protect some of the movie’s best cameos.
Still, it would’ve been interesting to see them try to pull off that weird prank. Some critics and avid movie fans make an effort to tell people to go into movies completely blind, so maybe some of the audience would’ve been genuinely surprised to see a cop movie with a weird premise be a Marvel flick in disguise. Or maybe they’d just get pissed off and wonder why they bothered to spend money on a movie that only existed as a gag.
Deadpool & Wolverine officially opens Friday, July 26.
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