Ryan Reynolds Explains How Deadpool & Wolverine's Madonna Moment Was Originally Super Tragic
540Ever since the release of its second trailer, Deadpool & Wolverine has been tied to a singular song - Madonna's gargantuan 1989 single "Like a Prayer." The song has been used in some form or another throughout most of the promotional footage for the film and in two very key moments of the movie itself. For the film's star Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, it was vitally important that Madonna agree to let her smash hit become the unofficial theme of the Merc With a Mouth's third outing so that they could fully realize their vision. When asked during a spoiler-filled interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub what they would've done if the legendary singer had said no, they flat out did not know.
Madonna isn't known for her willingness when licensing her music and getting the song on the soundtrack required an in-person visit from the pair to explain their reasoning directly to the Queen of Pop. Even considering the challenges, imagining the terrifying timeline where Deadpool & Wolverine didn't land "Like a Prayer" earned a "F**k me," from Reynolds and an "Ah, f**k," from Levy. Though the director couldn't stick around to answer the question and explain that reaction fully, Reynolds stressed just how crucial the song was by explaining his course of action if it didn't work out. "If Madonna said no I don't know what I would have done," he said. "I honestly don't know. I mean, my plan B was to ask her again. Which isn't great. I think that might have been my C, D, and E all the way through the alphabet until you go back around again with numbers beside it."
Beyond merely fitting the aesthetic of Deadpool and mixing well with the trailers, Reynolds said that he had long envisioned a scene incorporating the song even before the release of Deadpool 2. "I don't know, since 2017 that has been stuck in my head on a MoCo camera, motion control camera that is moving left to right. I know this is a comic movie, I'm not trying to sound like a douche. But I, you know, the David Lean,Lawrence of Arabia thing, everything moving left to right in the frame, kind of giving us this sense of progression and a journey and an overarching kind of theme of moving from one place to another where Deadpool and Wolverine are working together."
That idea would fit perfectly with the fight Deadpool and Wolverine team up for against the Deadpool corps full of variants of Wade Wilson, but it also played into a larger, more tragic plan Reynolds once had for Deadpool 3 involving everyone's favorite tin man Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) before the film took on its current form:
"It was always in my head, exactly like that, except in the original version, it was a sequence that I had before. This predated any kind of green light, this was part of a treatment that I'd written in 2020 - or 2021, I forget - where Colossus dies. And I, and he says, a kind of a call back to… Deadpool had been on this journey of like, self-discovery, or Wade had it basically where he'd like, you know, similar to now like given up the Deadpool suit, given up actually violence, and all these things and kind of like a bit sort of absorbed into like a kind of a cult kind of vibe, that he was sort of like, Colossus felt like he needed to get him out of.
Anyway, so Deadpool doesn't swear. He’s very, very kind of like chaste, and then when Colossus dies in the third act for the same MoCo sequence with "Like a Prayer," he says, because in Deadpool 2, I say, as I'm dying on the ground, I do this long, elaborate death in Deadpool 2 where I keep coming up with new reasons to not die. And it's exhausting all my friends around me who are sort of saying goodbye. I do a call back where Colossus says, he says, 'Wade, say f— for me,' as he's lying on the ground, dying, same thing I said to him, you know, and I'm like, ‘what, what?’ and, you know, I'm emotional. And he says, ‘Come on, we'll do it, we'll do it together, you know, on three, come on, here we go. It'll be fine. One, two…' and I sort of say [silence] and he dies, like before I even can say it."
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