Deadpool 3 has some kind of Return Of The Jedi nod that will show fans the power of movies
Director Shawn Levy wants to pay homage to a "forever memory" from his childhood
Deadpool 3 director Shawn Levy seems more interested in talking about Star Wars than Ryan Reynolds’ gross melty-faced mutant mercenary these days, possibly because Lucasfilm is letting him make a Star Wars that matches the “taste” he brought to iconic entries in the Shawn Levy canon like Free Guy and The Adam Project, and that’s continuing this weekend thanks to a new essay that Levy wrote for Esquire about the magic of the cinematic experience—an essay that, conveniently, finds a way to compare Deadpool 3 to Star Wars.
Specifically, Levy frames the essay around a moment in Return Of The Jedi that has stuck with him since he saw it multiple times in the theater, when Luke is facing off against Darth Vader at the end of the movie and takes a moment to hide under the stage in the Emperor’s throne room. Vader tells Luke that if he won’t turn to the Dark Side, then maybe Leia will, which Levy says was met with “pin-drop silence” in the theater. Then Luke screams and attacks Vader, and Levy says that being together with a group of other people in the theater at that moment—“the forty seconds of stillness from the audience, then the spectacle and emotion”—is “seared” into his memory.
He says it “creates a forever memory” when audiences are part of something like that, all together, being “reminded that the world is far bigger than ourselves,” and that’s what he wants to do with Blockbuster filmmaking. He says seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer reminded him that it was possible to do that kind of thing, and he teases that he has something similar in mind for Deadpool 3—and by “similar” we mean that he says he had his crew watch that scene in Return Of The Jedi on his phone and “restudied how it was photographed, how it was blocked, the framing, the tempo” so they could essentially recreate it.
Levy says that a “keen Star Wars fan” will recognize the shot in Deadpool 3 meant to evoke that scene in Return Of The Jedi, but that’s all he’ll say. Maybe there’s a part where Darth Vader threatens Deadpool’s sister? We never did find out who Emma Corrin is playing in the movie, so maybe it’s Darth Vader?
Sadly, we won’t get to find out for a while, because Deadpool 3 will be missing its release date due to delays because of the SAG-AFTRA strike.