Donald Glover’s animated Deadpool series for FX may have beentragically cannedbefore hitting screens back in March, but the exact reasonswhythe show never saw the light of day remain both mysterious and dramatic. Speaking toVarietyat the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour, FX CEO and Peak TV GuruJohn Landgrafadded more fuel to the cancellation flames.
According to Landgraf, Marvel simply did not want the type of show that theAtlantacreator and his brother/co-writerStephen Gloverwere making:
I think that Marvel will revive it, because they have the rights. 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. They didn’t want to do the show that Donald and Stephen [Glover] wrote. We would have done the 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.
Although Glover has never given an outright statement on the matter, you get the sense the dude isless than thrilledwith the whole thing. When news of the series' cancellation broke, theSolostar tweeted out a fakeDeadpoolscript—captioned, “for the record: i wasn’t too busy to work on deadpool"—that included a few amazing, cutting snipes at Marvel, such as:
DEADPOOL: I mean, I get it. Maybe they just wanna sell toys. And this style of comedy isn’t it. It’s more “ha-ha, but I’m mad”. I get that.
And gems like this:
DEADPOOL: It just feels like everyone wants something different, but no one wants to do anything different with it. Doesn’t Marvel have enough feel-good minority shows everyone supports but doesn’t watch? I mean, I think our show woulda been funny. I just wanted a place to be honest. (tearing up) And I guess that place is Freeform.
In the end, Marvel most likely lost out on a brilliant series, and Donald Glover busied himself by overseeing thebest show on TVand playing thecoolest pansexual space smugglerin the entire galaxy.
