By Travis Johnson

Rumours are currently flying that Ryan Reynolds will cameo in the upcoming Logan, Hugh Jackman’s final go-’round as the clawed and lawless mutant berserker, Wolverine.

In detail, the (fan wish fulfillment, surely) word around the campfire is that Deadpool 2 director, David Leitch, shot a credits stinger with Reynolds to be slotted in at the tail end of Logan, linking James Mangold’s dour, dramatic “Unforgiven with superheroes” movie to the surprise hit where Reynolds literally appeared with a picture of Jackman stapled to his face.

That right there should be your first clue that the odds of this being true are about a million to one. Logan is all but being treated as an art film, and both Mangold and Jackman are super-serious about giving the old Canucklehead a dignified send-off – the odds of either of them signing off on such a jarring kicker are slim to none. Earlier today, Mangold took to Twitter to tactfully deny the scuttlebutt:

And more directly:

And then The Wrap continued to poke the bear, publishing a story on Mangold’s denial of their original story. This did not go down well…

…which, yeah, is fair enough.

But really, this kind of story is like when you were a kid and your full-of-it buddy comes back from vacation claiming to have seen Return of the Jedi and swearing blind that Luke and co. go to Earth this time, except it’s being taken seriously by people who are purportedly adults. There’s no way that Deadpool is jumping into Logan in any form, unless it’s an oblique cameo (mask flapping on a stretch of rusty barbed wire, perhaps?), because it makes no tonal or narrative sense. This isn’t like the Marvel movies, where a bit of playful winking after the music comes up is an accepted part of the model. This thing looks like The Road, for crying out loud. You don’t stick in a cameo of Bugs Bunny chewing a carrot over Viggo Mortensen’s corpse in The Road, and you don’t stick Deadpool in this.

Unless…

What if Mangold doesn’t have final cut?

If we were particularly gormless yet Machiavellian Fox execs, more mindful of commerce than art and apprehending that Deadpool made more money than both previous Wolverine flicks combined, we might do something sneaky, like get another director to shoot some stuff and slot it in when the studio gets its editing pass. That’s not likely to happen – in fact, it’s groundless speculation – but if 2016 has taught us anything, it’s that we live in the Darkest Timeline, and Reynolds’ tweet is not quite a denial, although it sounds like one:

…which puts the kibosh on Deadpool appearing alongside Wolvie, but does not necessarily negate him appearing in the same film in a different scene, if you follow.

Look, all this is probably way, way off the mark, but if it is true, keep an eye on Mangold’s Twitter – his apoplexy would be something to behold.

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