The following contains spoilers for Deadpool 2.
Deadpool 2 had more great moments than you could count, but one of the best almost didn't happen. The end credits sequence of the film is getting a lot of, well, credit, as being one of the best among the crop of superhero movies, but quite possibly the best moment was when Deadpool uses Cable's time travel device to go into the events of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and assassinate that version of Deadpool. It turns out, they had trouble getting the scene they needed to use, for the insane reason that the movie was actually shot on film. According to Ryan Reynolds...
We had a dick of a time trying to get the actual raw footage though from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The movie was shot on film, it wasn't shot on digital so it was harder to get. We were sitting there on the Fox lot, the exact piece of the movie we need had been damaged on whatever the transfer was, so we had to go to some backup which was in some vault somewhere in the middle of the country, the United States, and we ended up finally, at the last second inputting it into the movie. For me, I was literally losing sleep over it though, I was thinking 'oh my god, how are we going to do this, am I going to have to call Hugh and ask him to shoot this chunk that looks exactly like a movie he's already done?' I can't think of a worse hell for a human being to do.
X-Men Origins Wolverine is less than a decade old, but it's old enough that the way movies were shot then is quite different than it is today. If the film had been shot digitally then getting the scene they needed would have been no trouble at all, but film is fragile, and there aren't just a million copies of movies shot that way sitting around. This meant that getting the scene they needed to insert into Deadpool 2 wasn't all that easy.
There is an almost unfortunate side effect of the fact that Deadpool 2 was able to get the scene they needed. Fans have wanted to see Ryan Reynolds Deadpool and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine on screen together ever since the first Deadpool movie came out, and if they had actually had to ask Hugh Jackman to redo the scene from Origins, it could have technically happened.
While Ryan Reynolds thinks that having to recreate a nearly ten-year-old movie would have been hell, it turns out, hilariously, that if it had come to that, only Hugh Jackman would have needed to look as he did back in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Reynolds tells the Empire Film Podcast, that he wouldn't have had to have his mouth sewn closed again.
Ironically, my side was fine. His side, the one shot we needed of him going, you know, 'Wade?' as he's looking at the bizarre Baraka-pool thing, we just didn't have.
In the end, the scene worked out and it only increased the fun in what was already a hilarious end credits scene. If you want to go see it again, Deadpool 2 is in theaters now.
