Why did the success of ‘The Avengers’ almost kill ‘Deadpool’ as a movie?

Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick did something superheroic on Deadpool: they stayed attached as the screenwriters of the film for six full years.

To understand just how weird that is, keep in mind that the way the studios are doing things these days, they will occasionally hire totally different writers to work parallel to one another, writing totally different scripts, only to shuffle those scripts together into weird-ass Frankenstein creations. Or they'll go from writer to writer to writer to writer until they finally end up hiring one of the eight or nine “closers” who seem to put their name on everything these days.

Not Reese and Wernick, though. Deadpool belongs equally to them, to star Ryan Reynolds, and to director Tim Miller. The final film is a genuine collaboration between that entire team, and they were all involved heavily in making it the film that you'll see in theaters tonight.

We don't always get the chance to interview writers, but I like Reese and Wernick on the page, and I liked the film, so we invited them to the HitFix studios in Hollywood to talk about the process and how they stayed attached and the joys of writing a character as crazy as Deadpool and so much more, including the secret extra ending that only paying customers get to see on the film. You'll see part one of the interview at the top of this story, and part two at the bottom.

With Deadpool off to an amazing start at the box-office, this may well be the beginning of a long association with the character for these guys, but for now, it's great to see that they pulled it off and the film is finally open for fans to enjoy.

Deadpool is in theaters now.

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