Why ‘Deadpool’ Writers Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick Were Rejected

If Deadpool & Wolverine screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have a superpower, it’s not sweating rejection.

When scores of stars turned down an offer to cameo in Zombieland, the studio was ready to give up, but Wernick insisted on a Hail Mary, and they asked star Woody Harrelson to dive into his rolodex for one more name. Two days later, Bill Murray was on set playing a zombie-fied version of himself in the movie’s most memorable sequence.

And as has been well documented, the duo — along with Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds and director Tim Miller — overcame six years of hearing the word “no” to make that movie a genre-redefining reality.

What is less known is that Reese and Wernick themselves were actually rebuffed when they initially pitched their take to Reynolds and 20^th Century Fox in the fall of 2009. The pair, hot off the success of Zombieland, were tired of superhero origin stories, so their pitch began with Wade Wilson already into his career and life as Deadpool.

“Ryan passed. Ryan essentially said, ‘Great but you know what? I don’t think you’re the guys to write this,’” Wernick tells The Hollywood Reporter.

They weren’t ready to give up. Their WME agent Phil D’Amecourt sent Reynolds a script Reese and Wernick wrote for an dead HBO pilot they penned for Todd Haynes, described as “a dark drama about a voyeur.”

Reynolds liked the script, and invited them to pitch Deadpool again — this time no execs. Over a two-hour lunch at Chateau Marmont, the trio hashed out a version of what would become the first Deadpool, with Reynolds soon firing off an impassioned email to Fox to hire the writers.

Fourteen years later, they are Reynolds’ go-to scribes and are back in theaters with Deadpool & Wolverine, a movie they wrote with Reynolds, director Shawn Levy and writer Zeb Wells. It’s already a hit and is poised to add a significant sum to the duo’s $2.26 billion combined box office haul. (And that number doesn’t account for the string of original, big budget streaming movies they’ve unleashed recently, such as 6 Underground and Ghosted).

Like other great screenwriting pairs, the two almost act as one mind, finishing each others sentences. And they share an affection that dates back to their youth. The duo went to the same high school in Arizona — Reese is three years older and was roommates with Wernick’s older brother in Los Angeles — and they became fast friends as they came up in Hollywood separately. Reese was working as a writer, mostly on children’s movies and TV shows, while Wernick was a producer of news and reality TV. One night, they decided they should create something together, and conceived of The Joe Schmoe Show, about a man who thinks he’s on a reality show (but everyone else is actually an actor). From there they wrote Zombieland as a spec and rose to become one of the most in-demand teams in Hollywood, known for shaking up genres and honoring them at the same time.

In a conversation with THR, Reese and Wernick talk about their long relationship with Deadpool, the challenges of trying to write a G.I. Joe movie when star Channing Tatum insisted on getting killed off, and what happened with a few moves that didn’t happen (Clue, Pirates of the Caribbean).

Do you ever give thought to what your lives might be without that night you came up with Joe Schmoe, which kickstarted your partnership?

Reese: I do. If we don’t have that idea that night, I am not married to the woman I’m married to. My wife was an actor on Joe Schmo three. We were not involved with Joe Schmo three because we didn’t have the bandwidth, but we went to the wrap party to celebrate with the people who had done it, and I met my wife that night.

Wernick: It’s Sliding Doors. It really has transformed our lives in more ways than just what’s on the screen.

Reese: Another example of that: We wrote this pilot for Todd Field to direct at HBO called Watch, and it never went anywhere. But it was a terrific script And the reason we got the Deadpool job was that Ryan Reynolds read that particular script, and if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have hired us — and we wouldn’t have written Deadpool. 

Wernick: We went in to pitch Ryan on the Fox lot for Deadpool in 2009. We were hot off of Zombieland, and so our agents set it up. We had heard of Deadpool, but we hadn’t read any of the comics. We did the deep dive and read all the comics and got the tone, and we went in to pitch Ryan and Fox.

Reese: We were really bored with origin stories at that point, so we pitched them a version of Deadpool where we were already into his career and his life as Deadpool the superhero. And Ryan didn’t go for it.

Wernick: Ryan passed. Ryan essentially said, “Great but you know what? I don’t think you’re the guys to write this.” And our agent, Phil D’Amecourt at WME, basically said, “These are the guys. Read this pilot read Watch.” It was a dark drama about a voyeur. And Ryan read it and he said, “Oh man, these guys, there’s more to these guys than Dick jokes.” (Laughs.)

Reese: He invited us to the Chateau.

Wernick: We had lunch at Chateau Marmont. It was November of 2009 I think. We were sitting outside for brunch. Ellen DeGeneres was sitting right next to us.

Reese: Amber Heard walked by us. It star-studded. We’re sitting there with Ryan and for two hours.

Wernick: And we essentially broke the movie — some semblance of Deadpool 1. At that moment, Ryan was like, “I want it to be an origin story.” This is all stuff that was in the comics that we just brought up to the surface — with the cancer and the heartbreak. And it was essentially Ryan digging for more heart into the character. And he saw that heart in our HBO Watch script, and that was the day that we got hired to write.

Reese: Ryan wrote this impassioned email to Fox saying after that lunch. “These are my guys. You don’t even need to hear the pitch. We’re going to figure it out, but these are my guys.” And that was what set us down the path.

Wernick: I’ve compiled a stack of all the emails starting from that particular email — of Ryan sending the passion plea to Fox to hire us all the way up to the green light. I one day want to publish as a book, the email history of Deadpool.

Reese: Poor Tim Miller and Poor Ryan and poor us. It was a long slog. There were so many times where we were so far from the goal, it was crazy.

Wernick: There were times thought we were close then got pushed back. We had Jim Cameron and David Fincher lobbying on our behalf to make the movie. It didn’t get it made. We had the leak, didn’t get it made. To see it in email form, it’s actually quite fascinating.

Reese: Tim Miller is an absolute pitbull. His energy never flagged. He fought and fought and fought.

Wernick: (Wernick Holds up a Squirrelpool action figure.) This is Squirrelpool. Tim Miller sent the four of us this as a “we’re done gift. The movie’s dead. Here’s Squirrelpool to remind us of all the heartache we’ve had.” I think that was 2013 maybe.

So, 2013. the movie is dead. But a few years after that you guys still haven’t given up.

Reese: Paul sent this email to Simon Kinberg, and the subject of the email was, “we need your ass,” but then after ass, it said —”istance,” so it spelled assistance.

Wernick:  I sent it on my birthday. It was Aug. 2nd. Simon was also born on Aug. 2nd. And that Monday next, Simon wrote back saying, “I read the script. We got to make this.” And he went to Emma (Watts, then-studio boss), guns blazing, and Emma had that trust in Simon. He was the steward of the X-Men universe at the time, although he wasn’t attached to Deadpool. And soon thereafter, we had a start date for a shoot, and we were off to the races two and a half months later.

Reese:  Yeah, I mean, I almost think we had a green light, or at least a flashing green light within a couple of weeks of that email, something like that. It moved quickly when Emma decided, okay, let’s do it. She got a bee in her bonnet and called Ryan. And of course, Ryan had been desperate to do it forever and had been banging the drum too. And suddenly we were rolling. It was crazy.

What do you remember when you finally got to set?

Reese Before the very first shot of Deadpool 1, Ryan called Tim and me and Paul over, and we all kind huddled right before the very first shot. We huddled together and we said, “All right, six years, here we are. Let’s not eff this up.” Basically. It was very emotional because it had been a journey we’d all been on for a while.

I want to zoom back a little bit. After Zombieland you are on fire, and get hired to write G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Channing Tatum has gone on record sharing his distaste for the previous movie, Rise of Cobra, which shot during the previous writer’s strike and didn’t have much of a script. So, he wanted to be killed off in this one. Is that an edict you got?

Wernick: We played with G.I. Joes kids. Rhett made G.I. Joe action figure stop motion movies as a kid. It was near and dear to us. So we came on. That’s when we learned Channing doesn’t want to be in the movie. He’s contractually obligated, but he doesn’t want to be in the movie. And we’re like, “Oh, boy.”

Reese: But we did write the first draft with him as the protagonist. We thought, “We got to convince him.” So we wrote it for Channing. Then the word came down. “No, the bottom line is Channing wants to be killed, so we have to have a new protagonist.” We then changed the protagonist to Flint, D. J. Cotrona’s s character, and we killed Channing off at the end of the first act. I think there was nervousness on the part of the studio — are we really going to hang this whole movie on Flint? DJ’s an amazing actor — not to take nothing away from him — but it was like, “is he really going to be the protagonist of the movie, or do we need some more star wattage?” So they thought, “Let’s go looking for more star wattage.” That took them to Dwayne Johnson. So now we rewrite the movie a third time.

Wernick: We sat with Dwayne Johnson. It was in New York, wasn’t it? And he was eating full chickens.

Reese: Eight cods were on the table, and he ate all of ’em. We talked him into it and we said, “Don’t worry, we’ll make you the protagonist. It’s Roadblock.” So we then wrote it a third time with a new protagonist. So we’ve now written a movie three times with three different protagonists, none of whom were exiting the movie. Flint was still in the movie. Duke (Johnson’s character) is still in the movie. And then a little bit later, we get the word that “We want to add a little more star power. What about Bruce Willis?” Thank God they didn’t say we want him to be the protagonist, because we literally would have jumped off cliff at that point. So we then wrote the Bruce Willis version, but the punchline of the story…

Wernick: …So we shoot the movie. Channing Dies. We test the movie and everyone’s like, “Boy, I love this Channing-Dwayne relationship. Is there are a way we could keep him alive in the movie?” And we’re like, “We’ve shot the fucking movie!”

Reese: We got into serious talks of, “What if you think he’s dead? But in fact, he’s been captured.” You spend the bulk of Act II every now and then going back to his prison cell where Cobra —

Wernick: — No, he was in a hospital bed.  

Reese: Cobra had Duke. And then at the end of the movie, he was going to break his chains and help in Act III. Well, I think finally (Skydance head) David Ellison put his foot down. In a meeting where this is all going around, he finally just calmed the room and said, “Guys, we killed Channing Tatum. That’s the DNA of the movie. He has to stay dead.” And once he said that, everybody’s like, “You know what? You’re right.”

In 2019 you were deep into your Clue script that would’ve starred Ryan. Hasbro has moved on from your take and is developing something with Sony. But do you have fond memories of that one?

Reese: I don’t know if we can say this. They just came back to us and asked us if we wanted to come back on it. We wrote a Clue draft for Jason Bateman to direct. And then Jason had to step off the movie to go do Ozark. So they brought on a new director, James Bobin. But he had his own writer that he loved. And so, we moved off the movie, another writer came on, it got developed further. Ultimately it didn’t go anywhere. And now it’s over at Sony, and Sony calls and said, “Well, would you like to come back?”

Wernick: They said, “Would you like to come back? What would you like to do? What’s your take?” And we’re like, “Just read the script.” (Laughs.)

Reese: There’s so many legal entanglements. They can’t use what we did. They have to go onto a new path. I don’t think we can break a second Clue movie. We gave it our best try.

Well, Clue didn’t work out, but you have to have one of the highest development to movies actually getting made ratio that I’m aware of.

Reese: We take such great pride in that fact. If we have any strengths, we tend to write movies as opposed to scripts. I know that sounds silly, but we really do think cinematically and have a pretty good sense that of what is a releasable, solid structure and story. We’ve had good luck. I think part of that too is we have partnered with Skydance so often.

Wernick: They run a studio like Old Hollywood. I doesn’t feel like shareholders. It feels like creative people making creative decisions. And that’s why we’re so excited about the Paramount news.

Around the time of Clue, you were reported to have a Pirates of the Caribbean take. Disney’s Sean Bailey was quoted as saying he wanted you guys to make it “punk rock.” How far did you get on that process?

Reese: We went in and pitched our take. We’re sort of the punk rock guys, but I think they wanted to do something even more different than we envisioned. What we envisioned was a continuation of the Pirates theme that had come before. I think they really wanted to have a record scratch and really wanted to make a movie that felt very, very different from what had come before.

Wernick: We don’t know how it’s evolved since.

Reese: We have no idea. And that was one that probably shouldn’t have gotten into the press, given that we hadn’t even pitched when it got into the press. It did need a pitch really to solidify. And then when it didn’t, there was a little bit of like, “Oh, I wish we hadn’t gone out with that story.”  

Wernick: If we have a brand, it would be that we come into a genre, we both make fun of that genre and we are that genre. We did it with Joe Schmoe with reality TV, we did it with Zombieland, with the zombie genre, and we did it with Deadpool with the superhero genre. And in this case, in the Pirates case, I think we were more the genre than making fun of the genre, if that makes sense.

Post-Deadpool 2, you had a string of streaming movies. You worked with Michael Bay and Netflix during an era of mega-budget streaming movies, that might be waning. What did you learn from that time?

Reese: They’re trying to create franchises over at Netflix, and 6 Underground did not become one. And I’m not sure exactly why. It’s probably to do with the finished product and it not being maybe quite what they’d hoped for. But I think it’s very nice that the streamers take swings on original stuff. Even though we’re doing a sequel now with Deadpool, and we did Zombieland 2, it’s nice to have a nice mix of original things mixed in. We’re doing an original comedy right now with Skydance and Amazon called Balls Up. That’s an original pitch of ours. 6 Underground was original pitch of ours. Ghosted was an original pitch of ours.

Paul: Life.

How do you guys decide what is worth your time to write a spec script for? You have so many guaranteed money jobs, but there’s a lot of value in creating these original things.

Wernick: Early in our career, Zombieland was a spec, but we’ve gotten away from specing.

Reese: We speced Spiderhead, and when I say spec, I mean actually write the full script. That is a risk we take less often, but we certainly do pitch. The IP stuff doesn’t across our desk as frequently as it did, because a lot of the IP it’s spoken for, Ted (Elliot) and Terry (Rosio) were doing Pirates all that time, then they weren’t. So that was our window into maybe doing Pirates. But there are specific writers, Transformers, Fast and The Furious, Avengers, where the writers move forward through. We’ve been Deadpool and Zombieland.

How did you find your way back to Deadpool 3? You weren’t the original writers. Did you return when Hugh called Ryan to say he wanted to come back, or was it before?

Reese: We didn’t do the first script on Deadpool 3. It was done by the Molyneux sisters. And ultimately when that script came in, they just decided collectively that wasn’t the direction they wanted to go. And so, they came back to us. We and Ryan sat down and tired to figure out what the new movie was. And it was tough. The toughest thing coming into Marvel was that there were almost too many options. We could focus on the MCU, we could focus on the former Fox characters.  

Wernick: It’s like going to the Cheesecake Factory!

Reese: The menu is big.

Wernick: Do I feel like Mexican? You got 17 pages of food options here, so it’s too much.

Reese: And I think we were all a little befuddled as to what is this story? And so we kind of chased our tail for a while.

Wernick: Months.

Reese: Who could we pair him with or partner him with? What are his goals and what are his wants? We talked about Deadpool & Wolverine too. That cycled through, but we just weren’t sure Hugh wanted to do it again. Logan had cast a very long shadow over the history of Wolverine, and it was a perfect ending. Would he go back there? And suddenly Hugh was saying, “I want to go back there.” From that moment forward, it was absolute pedal to the metal, because that narrowed all the options down. We knew it had to be kind of a buddy movie, and there were certain parameters that were already in place. I always hesitate to say it wrote itself, because that diminishes the input of the likes of us. But the movie came together very fast.

Wernick: It almost had to come together in the real hurry because we had the writer’s strike on the back end, and everyone was looking at that going, “If we’re going to hit the start date, we’ve got to figure this out.”

Reese: It was like the clouds parted and the sun came down and it was shining on Ryan and Hugh. You’ve got these two absolutely brilliant actors. You’ve got these two storied characters. What happens when this chocolate meets this peanut butter?

Wernick: It went from straight terror for those months to straight joy. We would zoom every day. It would be us and Ryan very early. Then Shawn came and came onto our Zooms. Then Zeb came onto our Zooms. We would call each other before bed, Rhett and I. And right before the lights went out, the demons would come. We were like, fuck, what is this movie? And then Hugh made that call.

Reese: And it was all glory after that.