Ryan Reynolds was able to turn Deadpool into a hit movie series by capturing the willpower of comic book fans (much like what the Green Lantern does), and now it looks like he’s trying to use that same energy to make Hugh Jackman appear in a Deadpool movie. The extended cut of Deadpool 2 directly addresses Reynolds’ long-running campaign to convince Jackman to reapply the claws and sideburns for another round as Wolverine, with a time-traveling Deadpool telling the version of Wolverine from X-Men Origins to get ready for a team-up, but so far we’ve seen very little indication that Jackman will ever be willing to come out of his self-imposed Wolverine retirement.
To Reynolds’ credit, though, he may have found a loophole. In a GIF-packed interview with Buzzfeed, Reynolds says that he’s going to “double-down” on trying to convince Jackman to appear in a future movie, but he no longer wants him to play Wolverine. Instead, he’ll settle for Jackman just popping up as himself, which—given the fourth-wall-breaking nature of Deadpool—would basically be just as good. The previous movies have established that Deadpool sort of exists in a world where the X-Men movies happened but also Hugh Jackman is an actor who starred in Logan, so having Hugh Jackman play himself would be the ultimate Wolverine cameo anyway.
That would be fun, but we’ve got an even better idea that we’ll give to Ryan Reynolds for free: Get Dougray Scott, the actor who was originally supposed to play Wolverine in X-Men, and have him play Hugh Jackman in Deadpool 3. We may be the only ones who would get it—let alone think it’s even funny—but it’d be so much easier than convincing the real Jackman to do another X-Men movie.