Donald Glover was working on an animated Deadpool TV show, but in March this year, the project fell apart. The show was set to air on FX, and now the network’s CEO has come forward to talk about why the program got the ax. It was Marvel’s decision, John Landgraf told Variety.
He said Marvel didn’t want to move forward on the show that Glover and his brother, Stephen, were working on. FX would have been happy to have it, but Marvel reportedly shut it down.
“[Marvel] didn’t want to do the show that Donald and Stephen [Glover] wrote,” Landgraf said. “We would have done show that Donald and Stephen wrote, but it wasn’t our decision. When Marvel decided not to do that show, we parted company with them as did Donald and Stephen. Now it’s totally up to them [Marvel] whether they hire someone else to do a different show.”
While the show isn’t expected to get revived at FX, Landgraf said he thinks Marvel will move forward with the concept of an animated Deadpool TV show eventually. “I think that Marvel will revive it, because they have the rights,” he said. “They own the IP and they have the rights to do an animated adult series based on any of the X-Men characters, and based on Deadpool specifically.”
Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld previously told Variety that Donald Glover is a “genius” and that he’s very sad his Deadpool animated TV show is not going to happen. “I’ll always wonder how that would have worked out,” he said.
Donald and Stephen Glover, as well as FX, released a statement in March saying the Deadpool show was canceled due to “creative differences” with Marvel, though it remains to be seen what those were. The canceled show was to run for 10 episodes in its first season, which was pegged to premiere in 2018 on FX sister channel FXX. Glover and his brother Stephen were tapped to be the program’s showrunners, producers, and writers.
It would have been the second TV collaboration between FX and Marvel, following Legion in 2017. FX co-president of original programming Nick Grad said when the Deadpool show was announced that the program was aiming to be “bold, striking, and entirely original.”
Deadpool 2 his theaters back in May, and it’s made more than $730 million worldwide so you can pretty much expect that a third movie is on the way. Indeed, all the way back in 2016, a report said Deadpool 3 was being planned.
