It’s been 5 years since Robert Downey Jr left the MCU after bowing out as Iron Man in Avengers Endgame.
Yet before the announcement of his return as Doctor Doom in Avengers Doomsday, a Tony Stark cameo was set for Deadpool and Wolverine.
The scene in question was at the start of the movie when Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson travelled to Earth-616 in 2018, before the events of Avengers Infinity War.
In the Marvel movie, Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan rejects Deadpool from joining the Avengers, but in the original script, Tony Stark was going to turn down Wade with him.
Speaking with IndieWire, screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick shared: “We had wanted him to do a cameo. We had written that scene [to start] with Happy and Downey. Ryan Reynolds read the scene with both of them, so in the hopes we could get Downey. But he also wanted Favreau, because they’re a great combo, and they were all in the scene together.”
As for why it didn’t happen they added: “And then we said, ‘Oh, Downey doesn’t say ‘no’ to Ryan Reynolds, does he? No one says no to Ryan Reynolds.’ And Ryan gave him the hard press. We wrote scenes, and Downey read the scenes, but what we didn’t know behind the scenes was this Doctor Doom thing.”
Interestingly an early version of the scene also included the rest of the original Avengers.
The screenwriters shared: “We haven’t told anybody this, but there was a version of that scene very, very early on that wasn’t written, but was conceived, that had all the Avengers in the room. And Wade was rejected and then he dressed all the Avengers down in a way only Deadpool could do. That’s a little bit of a scoop, but he was going to get mad and basically attack each one of them in a vicious kind of way.”