If this winds up being a complete coincidence, then holy hell is it ever a spicy one.
The surprise Once Upon A Deadpool trailer that dropped a couple of days ago caught just about everyone off guard. Except for one bloke on Twitter, who might have posted the exact framing device for the movie a full year ago, well before it was even being considered for production.
[jwplayer cYRrlbK0]
Since the trailer dropped it’s been confirmed that the film is a re-cut version of Deadpool 2 carrying a PG-13 rating, which is achieved through parodying The Princess Bride‘s framing device of having the story being read aloud to a child in bed.
However a random tweet from December 2017 by New York-based writer Michael Vincent Bramley not only suspiciously ticks a hell of a lot of boxes that that Once Upon A Deadpool premise carries, but it also happened to be directed at Ryan Reynolds himself.
Upon learning of the absurd similarities in premise, Bramley pointed out his original post from December 7th, 2017 late yesterday.
Sooo… I tweeted the exact plot of the new ‘Once Upon A Deadpool’ PG version of #Deadpool2 at Ryan Reynolds almost a year ago and it somehow wound up in a movie without me knowing. #deadpool #ryanreynolds #xmen #movies #OnceUponADeadpool #fredsavage #marvelmovies #mcu pic.twitter.com/tTMHwh2A1a
— M.V.B. (@MVBramley) November 21, 2018
A cursory re-watch of the trailer reveals that it’s pretty much word-for-word identical to Bramley’s premise, right down to the kidnapped adult Fred Savage.
Where it gets weirder is that the timelines of all this seem to lineup to a point where the Deadpool crew may well have lifted the idea for Once Upon A Deadpool‘s framing device from the tweet. Even if they didn’t actually realise they’d done it.
An interview with Slashfilm from back in October suggests that screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick believed that Reynolds was the one who came up with the parody for the PG re-cut. Not only that, but they suggested Reynolds pitched the idea after Deadpool 2 was released, meaning talk of a Princess Bride parody didn’t officially begin until May of this year; several months after Bramley’s tweet.
After Deadpool 2 came out and we were all sitting around, we came to it less about the idea of let’s make a PG-13 movie and more, ‘Let’s talk a little bit about Deadpool.’ We were kicking around some ideas and then I think it was Ryan [Reynolds] who had the great framing device and we allgot excited and went to the studio.
It’s entirely possible that the two parties came up with the idea independently months apart; as far as ideas for framing a PG-13 re-cut of Deadpool are concerned, a Princess Bride parody isn’t far off the top on the list of most obvious ones.
That said, it’s a spicy coincidence at best. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how the studio deals with it now the story’s broken.
