Ryan Reynolds had very specific tech (and humor) requirements for Wolverine’s corpse

polygon.com:

When a rep for New Zealand-based company Wētā FX asked whether Polygon wanted to interview someone about the company’s work on Deadpool & Wolverine, one line item on its project list made the answer an instant yes. Wētā, co-founded by Lord of the Rings franchise director Peter Jackson, has worked on all three Deadpool movies, particularly on managing Deadpool’s masked facial expression. Still, the project I had the most questions about was “a digitally enhanced Wolverine corpse.” Turns out that Deadpool & Wolverine star / producer / co-writer Ryan Reynolds has strong opinions about the amount of skin a decaying body needs for comedy purposes — and for teasing co-star Hugh Jackman. Wētā was there to help.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the opening sequence of Deadpool & Wolverine — and the end of 2017’s Logan.]

The latest Deadpool movie opens with Deadpool (Reynolds) telling the audience he’s about to desecrate the much-praised tragic ending of 2017’s Logan, the movie that supposedly marked both Wolverine’s death and Hugh Jackman’s retirement from playing the character. In need of a spare Wolverine due to multiversal shenanigans, Deadpool finds Logan’s grave and digs up his body, expecting him to have healed and revived, due to his famous healing factor.

Instead, he finds a dried-out mummy. It’s a thin layer of rotting, desiccated skin and muscle over Wolverine’s adamantium-laced skeleton — which Deadpool uses as an improvised weapon, slaughtering an entire team of Time Variance Authority soldiers with what’s left of Logan’s corpse.

In the version of the scene shot by director Shawn Levy and performed by Reynolds, there was no mummy, says VFX supervisor Daniel Macarin. “Originally, they were going to do a kind of prosthetic dead Wolverine that he rips out of the ground,” Macarin says. “And then as they were thinking about it, they’re like, Well, if he has so much skin or organic material on his body, wouldn’t people say, ‘Why doesn’t he just heal? Why doesn’t he come