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Movie Marketing

The Mystery of Where Deadpool’s Lines Will Actually Appear

As I’ve watched the campaign for Deadpool unspool over the last couple months in particular I’ve found myself noticing that, almost more than any other super hero or similar movie, it seems to feature a lot of dialogue that’s just kind of placed randomly in trailers.

Taking one example, let’s look at the shot where, in the first trailer, Deadpool inhales the smoke from his recently-fired weapons and says “…I”m touching myself tonight.” That same shot shows up in the trailer that debuted on Christmas Day but this time he says “This is a different kind of super hero story.” There are plenty of other examples of lines being swapped out and rearranged. In some cases this is to make the trailer or TV spot more contextual – so the whole Canadian Rules Football spot features dialogue that I don’t think is in the movie. Same with the “Well it’s Christmas” dialogue that accompanied the Christmas Day trailer.

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Those are understandable since they’re attempts to contextualize the trailer to be relevant to where or when it was released. Overall, though, I feel like there’s a lot of playing fast and loose with where dialogue is being placed, something that’s largely possible because Deadpool wears a mask, unlike many of today’s cinematic heroes. This is different from the standard practice of cutting two different scenes together to make it seem they’re connected because the dialogue provides a punchline or some such.

I’m not trying to say the Fox marketing team is intentionally trying to mislead the audience. But by playing to loose with the dialogue from the they’re also presenting a somewhat disjointed picture of the film. No, none of this will really matter but there are going to be more than a few heads that turn when watching the movie as someone thinks “That’s not how that was supposed to play out.” That kind of thing adds up over the course of a movie and could ultimately impact whether or not someone enjoys – and then recommends – the movie in question.

I get the desire to punch up a particular shot with dialogue borrowed from another scene or to overlay something more contextual to an existing scene. But doing so too often does create a distorted view of the movie, signalling that it may not be strong enough to stand on its own without some punchups in the trailer editing department. That’s where you start to risk blowback and with a movie that’s as widely anticipated as Deadpool it’s surprising that the studio would muck around with how it’s presented any more than is necessary.