Comedic Carnage

Deadpool director Tim Miller and layout supervisor Franck Balson chat about the development of the film’s over-the-top opening title sequence with Art of the Title’s Will Perkins. Balson on the movie’s tongue-in-cheek approach to credits:

“At the time we started the title sequence, no one had been cast except Ryan Reynolds. So because it was a title sequence the only names that were in there were Tim’s—which he asked me to remove really quickly—and Ryan’s. But we needed placeholders for the rest. I’d read the script and knew there was going to be a “hot chick,” “a young girl,” “a bad guy,” and so forth. That was the only thing we could put in there because we didn’t know who else was going to be in it.”

 Miller adds:

“The generic names just struck me as very funny. I shared it with Ryan and the writers, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and they loved it. The writers obviously loved the sequence since it was their concept, but they especially liked the idea of fake titles—the whole movie is very meta and that was super-meta. It wasn’t originally supposed to be that, but it seemed to fit so we just decided to keep it that way.”