[This story contained spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine.]
Logan co-writer Michael Green has confessed that the Deadpool & Wolverine opening scene left him pleasantly surprised.
The screenwriter, who co-wrote 2017’s Logan, which saw Hugh Jackman‘s superhero killed off, was recently asked during an interview with IGN about his reaction to the latest R-rated Marvel movie. The film’s intro features Ryan Reynolds‘ Deadpool digging up a rotting corpse of Jackman’s Wolverine from Logan and using his adamantium skeleton to take out a squad of Time Variance Authority officers.
“People had warned me ahead of time, ‘Uh, I don’t know how you’re gonna feel about the opening [of Deadpool & Wolverine]’,” Green recalled. “I’m like, ‘I think I know what’s gonna happen.’ And I did not know! I didn’t know they were gonna go that far.”
The Green Lantern writer continued of the opening scene, “You weren’t meant to take seriously that they were, like, digging him up, and that it was really him. It felt less like they were trying to change the ending of Logan as they were contending with not feeling that they wanted to make a movie as good as they felt Logan was, which is a huge compliment! I felt like it was nothing but complimentary.”
Before Jackman’s return as Wolverine in the record-breaking R-rated film, some people, including Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, were nervous about him reprising the beloved character after the ending in 2017’s Logan.
“I said, ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Hugh. Don’t come back’,” Feige told Empire magazine in May about a conversation with Jackman. “‘You had the greatest ending in history with Logan. That’s not something we should undo.’”
But the Les Misérables actor eventually convinced the Marvel boss that it would be with it since he would be playing a different version of Wolverine from his previous portrayals in the X-Men movies.