With the Fox/Disney merger going through, the X-Men are set to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the coming years, and Kevin Feige has said that the studio plans to reboot every single character – except for Deadpool. Ryan Reynold’s R-rated outings as the Merc with a Mouth have really struck a chord with audiences.
Deadpool 2 director David Leitch has said that the character’s big-screen adventures don’t necessarily have to be rated R, fueling speculation about how the character might fit into one of the MCU’s PG-13 movies. Here are 10 Ways To Fit Deadpool Into A PG-13 MCU Movie.
Make him physically unable to say swear words
In The Good Place, when Eleanor first arrives in the afterlife, she finds that she can’t say curse words anymore. If she tries to utter them, they come out as “fork” or “shirt” or, on some occasions, “Holy forking shirt!” and it’s completely out of her control.
The MCU could do something similar with Deadpool’s language, with the Merc with a Mouth finding himself unable to swear and hearing substitute words coming out every time he tries to say something bad. This will be how he determines whether he’s in a movie that’s rated PG-13 or one that’s rated R.
Bleep his cursing
There’s a chance that Marvel will just bleep Deadpool’s cursing. Bleeping is a standard censorship technique from television, but it’s been translated to the big screen with some interesting results. In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, for example, when the Bride revealed her real name for the first time midway through Volume 1, it was bleeped out.
When Deadpool joins the other MCU heroes in team-up movies (with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man being at the top of most fans’ wish-lists for potential on-screen Deadpool partnerships), he could do just as much cursing, but it would all be bleeped out like a TV show.
Do it like Once Upon a Deadpool
Around the holiday season last year, Deadpool 2 got a PG-13-rated re-release entitled Once Upon a Deadpool. It had a framing device in which Wade Wilson was retelling the events of the sequel to an adult Fred Savage, who he’d kidnapped, in a parody of The Princess Bride’s own framing device.
To avoid poisoning the baby-faced Wonder Years star’s mind, Wade toned down the language and violence of the movie in his recapping of it, which is how the film ended up being rated PG-13. Something similar could be done to earn the same rating for his upcoming MCU movies.
He saves up his one F-bomb in each movie
The PG-13 rating allows for the use of one F-word in each movie. There haven’t been any F-bombs in the MCU yet (although the Russo brothers reportedly considered including the first one in Avengers: Endgame, in which Tony Stark’s final line to Thanos would’ve been “F**k off!”), but that doesn’t mean they’re not out of the question.
If Deadpool was included in an Avengers-style team-up movie that was rated PG-13, he could save up his one F-bomb for a special occasion. It could become a running gag – in every MCU movie featuring Deadpool, fans would look forward to his one use of the F-word (and then someone like Wolverine might steal his thunder and say it themselves).
Blur the graphic violence
Marvel might run into some issues with the MPAA over what they can get away with in a PG-13 movie, but there’s probably a way to blur all the blood and guts involved in Deadpool’s action sequences when he’s in a larger team-up movie.
While Captain America’s shield would be bouncing off people and Spidey would be slinging thugs around with webs in bloodless sequences, ‘Pool would be decapitating people and yanking out their entrails – but it would all be disguised by blurred sections of the frame. It would take some doing, but it could be a fun and creative way to include Deadpool in the MCU.
Deadpool kills his PG-13 self
One fan has suggested an awesome way to introduce Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool into the MCU: to recast the role and reboot the franchise entirely with a PG-13 makeover – only for Reynolds to show up halfway through the movie and kill his PG-13 self. He would have made his way across the movie-time continuum to steal back his own solo franchise.
He struggled for years to get a faithful movie about himself into production, only to have his series cut short when Disney bought 21st Century Fox and rebooted him, and he’s not going to take it. We already saw Deadpool murder a PG-13 version of himself in the credits of Deadpool 2, so it could easily happen again.
He wakes up in a post-merger alternate reality
Ryan Reynolds has said that he wants to make the next Deadpool movie even crazier and more meta than the last, since the last one similarly upped the ante from the first one. An awesome way to do that would be to have Deadpool be aware of the Fox/Disney merger.
He would wake up one morning after the merger had gone through and find himself living in an entirely different reality – one where a guy named Thanos wiped out half of all life and had his plan reversed, and there are dozens of superheroes out there in the cosmos, and there’s a team called the Avengers that have saved the world several times, and worst of all, he’s being censored!
Just tone him down for the team-ups
It’s been reported that Marvel still wants to make Deadpool’s solo movies R-rated (the way Kevin Feige sees it, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), which would mean that he only needs to be toned down to PG-13 level for ensemble team-up movies where he wouldn’t have a huge role anyway.
Deadpool 2 director David Leitch has talked about finding this delicate compromise recently: “[Deadpool]’s rated R, so that’s not necessarily the [MCU] brand, but he doesn’t necessarily need to be R and [Disney] don’t necessarily need to only make PG-13 movies. I think we’ll find a happy ground.”
Cut away from the graphic violence
Deadpool’s weapon of choice is a sword (two swords, actually), so the violence in his standalone movies tends to get pretty gruesome. Since you can’t outright show a guy’s head getting lopped off or a gang getting diced up in a movie with a PG-13 rating like a Spider-Man movie or an Avengers movie, perhaps in these cases, the director can simply cut away.
We’ll still get all the sounds of the horrific violence, but instead of actually seeing it play out, we’ll see characters like Peter Parker and Bruce Banner reacting to it, wincing at each gut-wrenching slicing motion.
Deadpool can censor himself
The difference with bringing Deadpool into the MCU as opposed to any other R-rated character is that he is aware that he’s in a movie and he can break the fourth wall.
So, he can be fully aware of the fact that he’s in a PG-13-rated movie and he needs to tone himself down and censor himself with the clean words they use to replace swear words in TV broadcasts of profane movies, like “melon farmers.” Some of these replacements are so outlandish that they’re funnier than the swear words themselves, so this technique could be put to great use.