Disney Commit to ‘Deadpool 3’; New Writers Board

Disney recently acquired 20th/21st Century Fox in a $71.3billion deal that saw the transfer of all of Fox’s intellectual properties (aside from their sports and news networks) to the The Walt Disney Company. The purchase included multiple licenses for Disney’s Marvel superheroes, which had been auctioned to rival studios ahead of Disney’s $4billion purchase of the comic book/multimedia brand in 2009. Along with characters such as The Fantastic Four and Daredevil, the licenses for the X-Men were purchased as a part of the Disney-Fox deal and have since been placed under the banner of Disney’s Marvel Studios and studio head Kevin Feige, who is reported to have preferred full reboots to the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises over any kind of extension to their pre-existing universes.

One such a title that seemed destined for limbo was Deadpool. The notoriously R-rated anti-hero series didn’t seem to fit into the family-friendly output of the Disney brand, especially in the new era of Disney Plus (where every release is limited to a PG-13 maximum age rating). The rude and crass branding of the Ryan Reynolds fronted comic book adaptations put Feige and Marvel Studios in an awkward spot; either kill the multi-billion dollar Deadpool franchise and refuse the opportunity of astronomical profits, or forego the standards of their own releases and finally embrace the R-rating.

This most recent news indicates that Feige, Marvel and Disney are opting for the latter…

In a rumour confirmed by the official Deadpool Twitter account, Deadpool 3 is moving forward under the Marvel Studios banner and has hired new writers to steer the project into a new era.

Sisters Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin and Wendy Molyneux of critical hit and Emmy Award winning animation ‘Bob’s Burgers’ will write the script for Deadpool 3, the duo replacing outgoing writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick who wrote the scripts for both Deadpool and Deadpool 2.



The sisters, who also cowrote Fox series ‘The Great North’, are expected to work alongside star Ryan Reynolds to confirm the iconic character’s new direction, the Canadian filmmaker acting as star, producer and writer on Deadpool 2, and long holding a strong working relationship with outgoing writers Reese and Wernick.

While an age rating has yet to be confirmed by Disney, Marvel or Reynolds himself, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has gone on record numerous times in the past to express how it is possible for Deadpool to maintain its R-rating under the Disney banner, and it is expected that Deadpool 3 will be rated R.

It is expected that Deadpool’s sister franchises The Fantastic Four and X-Men will be integrated into the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe in the coming years, The New Mutants marking the end of the X-Men franchise that had been a box office ever-present since 2000 and Fantastic Four (2015) being the last Fantastic Four film in a tumultuous tenure for the characters under the Fox banner.

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