Simon Kinberg Says DEADPOOL 2 Won’t Be Bigger Than The First DEADPOOL

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Deadpool 2 producer Simon Kinberg assures us that the sequel to this year's surprise hit will keep things the same, but also different. 

Says Kinberg:

"The goal for us when we sat down and started talking about it was it needs to be as provocative and startling as the first film which means it can’t just be a continuation of the first film. It has tonally and stylistically be as fresh and original. That’s a big challenge especially because they had 10 years to gestate on the first movie and we don’t have that kind of time on the second movie. That’s the biggest mandate going into on the second film: to not make it bigger. We have to resist the temptation to make it bigger in scale and scope, which is normally what you do when you have a surprise hit movie. But actually stay true to the tenets of it’s the tone and the style and the humor that make it so special — it’s not the explosions and the special effects.”

The first Deadpool, which arrived in February and promptly made all the money (over $780M worldwide at the box office), famously had a production budget of just $58M, and so you'd be forgiven for expecting 20th Century Fox to go overboard in budgeting for the sequel. That's usually how these things go! So it's good to hear that Kinberg (and, according to all involved, the rest of the Deadpool creative team) are interested in maintaining the same mid-budget overhead for the sequel. Keep these things affordable and they could keep making 'em forever.

As for being "tonally and stylistically" fresh as the original, well, that's going to be more of an uphill battle. Part of what made Deadpool work was the element of surprise, in giving audiences something they'd either not seen before or weren't expecting. Sure, you're an informed Birth.Movies.Death. reader (and, statistically, probably a gigantic comic book nerd), so you knew what to expect when you walked into Tim Miller's film. But many other people didn't, and found themselves delighted to be watching a superhero movie which was unafraid to, say, let its hero get pegged onscreen. Just ask my wife.

Anyway, we're a ways off from Deadpool 2 - it's still coming together, and won't arrive in theaters until 2018. Here's hoping they accomplish what they're setting out to do.