Deadpool & Wolverine: Shawn Levy Explains Why They Made You Wait For That Wolverine Mask Reveal
414Editor's note: this article contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine
Deadpool & Wolverine marked a lot of firsts with its release. The Merc With a Mouth's third trip to the theaters is the first MCU film with an R rating and the first appearance of Ryan Reynolds's and Hugh Jackman's characters in the franchise under Kevin Feige. It's also, notably, the first time that Jackman has ever donned the iconic yellow suit Logan is known for outside the live-action adaptations. The biggest surprise, however, was kept secret, leaving theatergoers to finally see Jackman's Wolverine also wear his iconic black and yellow mask to match the suit, if only for a brief time. In a spoiler-heavy interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub, director Shawn Levy explained how that scene came to be and how it was designed to elicit the biggest reaction possible from fans of the iconic X-Man.
First and foremost, when Weintraub expressed his and other fans' excitement to see the mask come out, Levy said that the Deadpool & Wolverine team was just as hyped for the big moment. “So did we, when we filmed it, by the way," he said. "So did we." The film was released just under 25 years after Jackman first appeared on-screen as Logan in 2000's X-Men, and since then, viewers have long wanted to see him don the full comic-accurate outfit. It's a big payoff for the Fox Marvel universe, even if the Wolverine in this film is a different variant from the one buried at the end of Logan, meaning Levy wanted to handle the moment with care.
The director's mantra when deciding when to deliver the big payoff was to build anticipation rather than deliver early. Even though the inclusion of the mask was conceived early on, he knew it was better to wait for a moment when it would hit hardest. He found that exact moment in the film's climactic fight against the Deadpool corps when Wade and Logan join forces in battle for the first time properly. Of course, since it's Deadpool, he has to undercut the mask coming up by landing a joke, which is the only way Levy could've imagined it:
"So I just remember early on, very early on, when I was still storyboarding, it became clear that okay, he's got to wear the mask, but don't give it up too early. Make them wait for it, make it later, and make it count. And then we were shooting that day and when Hugh pulled it on, we knew that we were going to undercut it. Right, we were going to undercut it with, Deadpool makes an incredibly fast... he says ‘You save the good stuff for special occasions.’ Wolverine says ‘Killing mostly.’"
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