Marvel boss warned Hugh Jackman not to return as Wolverine in Deadpool 3

Marvel boss Kevin Feige has revealed he warned Hugh Jackman not to return as Wolverine for the forthcoming Deadpool movie, now titled Deadpool and Wolverine.

Jackman had played the X-Men character in nine different films, concluding the character’s arc with the acclaimed 2017 film Logan.

However, Jackman is now set to return as Logan/Wolverine in the third Deadpool movie, opposite Ryan Reynolds.

“I said, ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Hugh. Don’t come back’,” said Feige, speaking to Empire magazine. “[Jackman had the greatest ending in history with Logan. That’s not something we should undo.”

At the end of Logan, which is set in a bleak and dystopian future, Jackman’s character ultimately sacrifices his life for the sake of a young protege.

Jackman also described his response to being offered the role in Deadpool and Wolverine. “I drove for another hour,” he recalled. “Couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I got out of the car, called Ryan [Reynolds], and said, ‘Ryan, if you’ll have me, I’m in.’”

It was also revealed that Feige rejected Reynolds’s original pitch for the film, which would have involved a subjective re-telling of the same events several times, in the vein of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic Rashomon.

The actor says he first envisioned the sequel as being a “Rashomon story about Wolverine and Deadpool and something that they got into together, but told from three completely different perspectives. It was a way to make a large-scale movie in a very small way.”

Speaking about his decision to turn down the pitch, Feige said: “The truth is, I wasn’t even sure how to incorporate Deadpool yet. I was very much thinking about how to bring mutants and the X-Men into [the Marvel Cinematic Universe], and I thought it needed to be more than just playing the hits. But the truth is, Ryan is an idea machine. So he may have pitched that to me, but he also pitched 25 other thoughts and ideas.”

After this idea was scrapped, Reynolds “went back to the drawing board” and wrote up as many as 18 different story ideas for the project.

“Some of them [were] almost like a Sundance film, a budget of under $10m, sort of using the IP [intellectual property] in a way that they previously hadn’t used,” he said. “And I pitched bigger movies, and I pitched things in-between.”

Deadpool and Wolverine is released in cinemas on 26 July.