Disney CEO Bob Iger personally asked Ryan Reynolds to remove a crude joke about Mickey Mouse from the upcoming film Deadpool & Wolverine, according to Reynolds himself.
Speaking on the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Reynolds recalled a conversation with Iger following an early screening of the film. The Disney executive raised concerns over one specific line.
“The first time he saw the film it was in pretty good shape,” Reynolds said. “And he said, ‘You’ve got to remove the one line, Ryan.’”
Reynolds admitted he was confused at first. “I said, ‘What line?’ and he replied, ‘You know the line.’ Then I realized — ‘Mickey Mouse?’ He said yes.”
Reynolds initially resisted. “I told him, ‘Bob, the whole movie orbits around that line. It’s the thrust, the thesis, it’s everything,’” he explained. “In my head, I was thinking, ‘Precious. Must keep the line.’ I had to walk a few laps around his office, but in the end, we were good. We changed it. He just didn’t want that Mickey Mouse joke in.”
Although the line was removed from the final cut, it later surfaced online through the original script posted on Disney’s “For Your Consideration” portal. In the scene, Deadpool reacts to Magneto’s death and Ian McKellen’s absence from the film.
“F–k! What, we can’t even afford one more X-Man? Disney is so cheap,” Deadpool says. “I can barely breathe with all this Mickey Mouse c–k in my throat.”
Reynolds told O’Brien that the joke may have drawn more attention after being cut than it would have in the film. “Because of the script release, it probably got more attention than it would have if it had stayed in,” he said.
Director Shawn Levy also addressed the joke in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. He confirmed that the Mickey Mouse line was the only one Disney asked them to change.
“There was only one line in the entire movie that we were asked to change,” Levy said. “Ryan and I made a pact to take that line to our graves.”
Levy also revealed what replaced the original joke: a similarly raunchy line involving another Disney character. “It was replaced with an equally dirty line about Pinocchio shoving his face up Deadpool’s ass and starting to lie like crazy,” he said. “I told Ryan, ‘That’s your clean version?’ That’s Ryan Reynolds for you — audacious to the very edge.”
