Deadpool Collection

Deadpool first appeared on screen in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and it went badly enough that Reynolds, who played him, reportedly tried warning Fox executives at the time that the take — mouth literally sewn shut, stripped of the character's defining chattiness — would upset fans. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick cracked the version that actually worked years later, while Reynolds was simultaneously off filming his own notorious DC flop, Green Lantern, in 2011. Fox remained nervous about an R-rated superhero film regardless, so in 2012 they had director Tim Miller produce a short, low-six-figure-budget test reel just to prove the tone could work.

That footage is where the genuinely strange part of this story lives. It leaked online in the summer of 2014, generated an enormous, immediate fan response, and Fox greenlit the full film almost immediately after — the test footage even closed with a direct dig at Tom Rothman, Fox's studio head at the time, who'd actually already left the company by the point the leak happened. Who leaked it stayed an open question for a full decade, with Reynolds publicly deflecting for years, joking he was "70 percent sure" it wasn't him, even dodging the question directly during a 2024 interview. He's since admitted, directly, that it was him.

The numbers that followed justify the gamble: Deadpool (2016) cost $58 million and made close to $800 million, becoming the highest-grossing X-Men film ever made and the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time until Joker. Deadpool 2 (2018) cost $110 million and made about $785 million. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) is the outlier even by this franchise's standards — a $200 million budget returning $1.338 billion, by far the series' biggest result. That third film exists in its specific, R-rated form because of a real, documented studio question: once Disney's acquisition of Fox brought these characters under Marvel Studios for the first time, there was genuine internal debate about whether an R-rated film belonged anywhere near the otherwise strictly family-friendly MCU. The answer, backed by the first two films' numbers, was yes — making this the first R-rated entry in Marvel Studios' own cinematic universe.