Filming began in March 2015, six years after “Origins” hit theaters. Even though Fox gave the film a green light, they didn’t make things easy behind the scenes. Rumors swirled that they got the green light because they were willing to make a PG-13 version. Fortunately, in July 2015, “X-Men” franchise producer Simon Kinberg confirmed that they were going R-rated. “Deadpool is a hard R. It’s graphic. Nothing is taboo. You either commit to a truly outrageous boundary-pushing kind of movie or you don’t.”
As for locking down the story, Reese explained in a Blu-ray featurette that it was Reynolds who stepped in to make “Deadpool” an origin story:
“We originally pitched a non-origin story, interestingly, just a Deadpool adventure. We pitched to Ryan Reynolds and he enjoyed the pitch, but he was pretty emphatic about the fact that it had to be an origin story. So ultimately what happened was, we kind of melded the two.”
Reese and Wernick cracked that story with Reynolds while he was filming a different superhero film, 2011’s box office bomb “Green Lantern,” for DC. “What a lot of people don’t know is [writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick] flew to New Orleans and, while I was shooting ‘Green Lantern,’ we were actually all together writing ‘Deadpool,'” Reynolds explained in a 2017 interview.
Even as production rolled on, the crew was forced to make aggressive cuts to meet strict budget demands made by Fox. “Deadpool” had a $58 million budget, which was less than half of what the average superhero movie cost at the time. As a result, major sacrifices had to be made, including slashing $7 million from the budget at the last minute. That involved trimming action sequences, cutting characters and even a big gunfight. As Reese explained to Gizmodo in February 2016:
“We had a big, big gun fight in the third act that we took out and we basically had Deadpool forget his guns as a means of getting around it. So there were just reductions.”