KEVIN FEIGE ORIGINALLY TOLD HUGH JACKMAN ‘DON'T COME BACK' AS WOLVERINE, REJECTED RYAN REYNOLDS' FIRST ‘DEADPOOL 3' PITCH FOR ‘RASHOMON'-STYLE FILM

"Deadpool and Wolverine" is poised to be one of the biggest movies of the year thanks to the pairing of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, who is returning to his iconic X-Men role for the first time in seven years. Jackman's return is skyrocketing buzz around the comic book film, which is much needed for Marvel Studios after a rocky 2023 that saw movies such as "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" and "The Marvels" flop at the box office. It might come as a surprise, but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige confirmed to Empire that he originally warned Jackman against playing Wolverine again.

"I said, ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Hugh. Don't come back,'" Feige said. "‘You had the greatest ending in history with ‘Logan.' That's not something we should undo.'"

What ultimately got Feige on board with the idea of Jackman coming back was that he would not be playing the version of Logan/Wolverine that audiences grew to love in the various X-Men movies. That was also of interest to Jackman himself. His original iteration of Wolverine died in "Logan," and he did not want to screw with that film either.

"It's all because of this device they have in the Marvel world of moving around timelines," Jackman previously told SiriusXM about returning. "Now we can go back because, you know, it's science. So, I don't have to screw with the ‘Logan' timeline, which was important to me. And I think probably to the fans too." 

Jackman added in a new interview with Empire that "Deadpool and Wolverine" will show "different sides of Wolverine we haven't seen before in the movies."

Feige not only warned Jackman at first not to return as Wolverine, but he also told Empire that he rejected Ryan Reynolds' original pitch for a third "Deadpool" movie as the two were figuring out the best way to introduce the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe following Disney's acquisition of Fox.

Reynolds revealed that he first envisioned "Deadpool 3" as a "'Rashomon' story about Wolverine and Deadpool and something that they got into together, but told from three completely different perspectives. It was a way to make a large-scale movie in a very small way."

Feige turned down the pitch, although he added: "The truth is, I wasn't even sure how to incorporate Deadpool yet. I was very much thinking about how to bring mutants and the X-Men into [the MCU], and I thought it needed to be more than just playing the hits. But the truth is, Ryan is an idea machine. So he may have pitched that to me, but he also pitched 25 other thoughts and ideas."

Reynolds "went back to the drawing board, and I wrote up about 18 different treatments. Some of them almost like a Sundance film, a budget of under $10 million, sort of using the IP in a way that they previously hadn't used, and I pitched bigger movies, and I pitched things in-between."

Whatever it is Reynolds and Feige agreed on, audiences will finally be able to check it out when "Deadpool and Wolverine" hits theaters on July 26 from Disney.