‘Logan’ Was Going To Be R-Rated Before ‘Deadpool,’ Insists James Mangold

The success of Deadpool last February immediately led to suggestions that the blockbuster had changed the superhero landscape. We’ll find out if Deadpool was actually an anomaly when Logan becomes the second R-rated superhero film to be released. But director James Mangold has now insisted that Logan wasn’t made R-rated because of the box office success of Deadpool, instead explaining that the plan was always to make it more mature.

James Mangold made this admission to Comic Book at the recent press junket for Logan in New York City, revealing that the discussions about making the blockbuster R-rated had actually begun before Deadpool was released. However, Mangold admitted that the success of the Ryan Reynolds-led comic-book adaptation did make the decision to release Logan as an R easier.

“Two things happened. We were already down the road of ‘R’ before Deadpool had been released. I think that they did know, the studio, they felt that they had a real success even though it hadn’t been released yet that they had something people would be really excited to see.”

While James Mangold, who previously directed Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted, Walk The Line, 3:10 To Yuma, and The Wolverine, insisted that plans were already in motion to make Logan R-rated, he did praise 20th Century Fox for actually going through with it. Mangold then explained that by doing so, the studio was helping to rejuvenate the superhero genre, which the filmmaker believes has become a little stagnant because of the recent glut of entries to the genre.

“But, I think, you have to give all the studios credit, but particularly Fox, in the sense that they were aware, acutely aware, that these bloated $200 million aren’t quite creating the sensation they were five or six years ago and you get into a kind of arms race with spending more, casting more, louder, faster, more, louder, faster, more… But at some point, I can only speak for myself and there are some really good ones that come out, but I find my eyes rolling up in my head even as my ears and eyes are going blown out with amazing visuals and sounds, I find myself just overloading.”

This isn’t the first time that James Mangold has revealed that Logan was always intended to be R-rated. During his discussion with Fandango several weeks ago, Mangold once again reiterated that while Logan was always intended to be R-rated, the fact that Deadpool was such a huge success meant that 20th Century Fox were much more comfortable with the decision.

“I was already writing this movie before Deadpool came out, but I will say that what Deadpool did is it made the studio feel a lot better about taking the risk I was asking them to take. They saw there was a marketplace reward for being different.”

While Deadpool proved to be a huge success for 20th Century Fox, the studio originally didn’t have much faith in the comic-book adaptation. Not only did they give it a budget of just $58 million, but they also asked for amendments to be made right before production was due to begin, too, so that they could save even more money.

Despite these adjustments, and the fact that 20th Century Fox had shown little enthusiasm for the project, Deadpool went on to become a huge success for the studio, as it grossed $783.1 million at the box office. This not only made it the highest grossing R-rated film of all time, but it also made it the highest grossing X-Men film from the franchise, too. Because of this success, a sequel to Deadpool was greenlit, and it’s expected to be released in 2018.

[Featured Image by 20th Century Fox]