Fresh off the almost $90 million opening weekend for X-men Origins: Wolverine, Fox is rushing ahead on a similar treatment for Marvel's favorite mercenary, Deadpool.

If you're keeping score along at home, a Deadpool movie would be a spinoff of a spinoff of the original big screen adaptations of X-Men. Ryan Reynolds played the wisecracking super gun for hire in Wolverine, and will return in the title role.

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The movie's version of Deadpool is beheaded by Wolverine, but a post credit sequence on some prints unveils that the mercenary survived.

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While the new movie seems like a sensible enough move considering the success of the first X-Men Origins, there's a risk here. If you walk down the street in any American neighborhood, your fellow pedestrians know who Batman is. They could pick Spider-Man and Superman out of a line-up. So, movies based on those characters become blockbusters. But, once you start to get to faces from the outer reaches of comic lore, the receipts can dwindle quickly (see Ghost Rider, Judge Dredd, The Punisher, Steel and (yes) Watchmen.

While Marvel Studios will act in a co-producer capacity, this will be a Fox Studios film.

No doubt die-hard comic book fans would catch a Deadpool flick, but would casual moviegoers flock to it in Wolverine-ish amounts? And there's also the question of whether they'll undo the butchering of the character (figuratively and literally) that took place in Wolverine.

Source Hollywood Reporter