A choir sings Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” Deadpool attempts to destroy the Time Ripper but can’t do it himself. In comes Wolverine, completing the link and sealing their fates as both believe they’re sacrificing themselves to save the world. It’s a powerful moment and the big finale to Deadpool & Wolverine but the sequence took a long time to get there. io9 spoke to one of Deadpool & Wolverine’s editors, Shane Reid, who took us through the fascinating iterations that led to the film’s climax.
When we spoke to Reid over video chat, he explained that star Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy had the idea for a reprise of “Like a Prayer” from the very beginning. But, without a sense of what that actually sounded like at the start, Reid decided to try something different. “I would present a lot of ideas to these guys and remember I had this connection to Journey’s ‘Separate Ways’ and I really wanted to use it,” Reid said. “I felt like, ‘Man, when you walked in that power room and you heard the song come in, I was like, this is what the scene’s about.’ It’s so funny. There’s abs. It’s a throwback to these ’80s action movies and we’re just going to indulge in it. And this song allows us to laugh.”
Reid pitched it to the powers that be and got a surprising response. “I remember walking up to Ryan and Shawn on set and they were like, ‘Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to take this. We’re going to do Madonna. We’re going to do this and this and this.’ And I went, ‘Okay, but I also have been starting to think about Journey’s ‘Separate Ways’ and they were like, ‘FUUUCK! Okay, do that too. I want to see that too.’ And that is just the creative partners they are.”
“And so it went down that road,” Reid continued. “I convinced everybody. It was undeniably fun. The VFX department was coming in and watching it. People were hearing it pumped down the hall. Shawn was into it. And then we had an assembly of the film and really all that was shot for that [ending sequence] was the guys were just going to link up and explode. We played the movie for Ryan and that scene just… I’ve never been more disappointed in myself. It was like just this music video that had nothing to it. It was building to this big moment and it just completely fell flat. And so we had to really think about that scene again and start to ask ourselves ‘What is the core of this? What are we doing and what are the stakes and how are we going to show those stakes?'”
This conversation happened as marketing for the film began to roll out. Reid watched the Super Bowl at Reynolds’ place, which is where the first trailer for the film debuted. On his way home, he figured it out. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” he said. “They had done a really great job in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of seeing time erase by doing sort of practical ideas. So we started there. How do we build something visually where we can represent Wade is losing his life? We talked about the photo from Back to the Future. How do we sort of showcase this visually? And that became really interesting.”
Reid began to dig into and manipulate footage from the previous two Deadpool movies, as well as scenes from earlier in this film, to show loss in Deadpool’s life and the scene began to take shape. “We built this really beautiful moment with Deadpool,” Reid said. “I found an online choir that had done Madonna, so we were able to kind of weave something together as a starting point and start to understand the tone. We were like, ‘Okay, yeah, this does feel like it wants more.'”
The problem though is the movie isn’t “Deadpool 3.” It’s Deadpool & Wolverine. “I think it might have been Kevin Feige who—and definitely Shawn, but a combination of those guys, who were like, ‘If we’re doing that for Deadpool, we have to do that for Wolverine,'” Reid said. “This has to be a moment about these two guys. We have to build it equally and it has to feel like their journey is paying off.” But while there’s plenty of footage of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine going around, none of it is of THIS version of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.
“Wolverine was harder because you can’t pull into the last Logan movie,” Reid said. “You can’t pull into those films because it’s not supposed to be him. You didn’t have anything that felt like Wade’s birthday party where we could use these tricks and plates to build something that felt like Vanessa vanishing or something.”
Where would the footage come from? The answer was right in front of them. “I did this big deep dive where I started just thinking about all the words that we’d heard throughout the movie,” Reid said. “The poignant moments of like, ‘You’re never going to matter’ or ‘You can finally matter’ or whatever it was. I started to pull those together and put images over it. And then I realized ‘Oh, well, on the cutting room floor was this sequence where Wolverine finds the photo on the ground and looks at it. And that was in the movie, but we got rid of it for timing. And then at the campfire Dafne [Keen as X-23] says, ‘You were always the wrong guy until you weren’t.’ We trimmed that as well. We wanted to leave that on a comma versus a period.”
“And so we had that and I started to think if we as an audience are seeing these moments of their life, outside of what we witnessed, it should be continuing,” Reid said. “We started to find moments that felt like they were beyond what the audience had seen. And then when Hugh said, ‘I am the X-Man,’ that was originally in a scene with Cassandra and we decided to pull that and save it and have that be a moment as he accepts his fate. And so it was all a construct of pulling from the things we felt were new information to the audience. It didn’t feel super redundant or repetitive, but could allow us into their souls for a minute and could leave us with something that felt powerful and emotional.”
Mission accomplished. Deadpool & Wolverine is now in theaters.
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