In news that will have a certain portion of the fandom foaming at the mouth, and for all the wrong reasons, Tim Miller who is directing the forthcoming movie adaptation of the comic ‘Deadpool’ has confirmed that the hero will be “pansexual”.
Deadpool, played in the movie by Ryan Reynolds, has often been portratyed as “hypersexualised” in the books. Co-creator Fabian Nicieza said of the character, a hyper-violent, self-healing mercenary riddled with cancer: “Deadpool is whatever sexual inclination his brain tells him he is in that moment. And then the moment passes.”
Tim Miller agrees. In an interview with Collider, he said that Deadpool is”pansexual. I want that quoted. Pansexual Deadpool.”
Deadpool, or Wade Wilson, is a notorious character from the X-Men universe who escaped his fairly generic origins to become a comedic antihero who breaks the fourth wall by talking to the reader. He has been portrayed as flirting with both sexes, including Thor and Spider-Man, and it seems as though the movie will follow suit, although it remains to be seen how far the film makers will go with this.
Reynolds recently praised the studio for its hands-off approach – the film has received an ‘R’ rating, and he said: “You kinda think you have moments when you’re shooting where you think: ‘This is, uh, a little excessive. This is a comic book movie. Are we gonna get away with this?’ But so far, so good.”
So it seems we’re going to get a hefty amount of sexual content, some of which can be glimpsed in the red band trailer released online. It’s likely that most of the sexual content will be distinctly heterosexual though, with nods made through humour to his pansexual nature, so we’re probably not going to see a non-hetero-normative superhero on-screen just yet.
The character was surrounded by some controversy recently when Nicieza said on Twitter that Deadpool wasn’t pansexual and then went on to clarify with the above statement – something that many readers took as an attempt at pansexual erasure – so it’ll be interesting to see how this is represented on screen.
