As soon as Zeb Wells hops on a Zoom call to discuss his involvement in Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s clear that spirits are high. With a beaming smile, the screenwriter and comic-book writer declares, “It’s a good day!”
Wells has every right to feel giddy. The latest Marvel smash starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman crushed its box office projections, grossing $438.3 million to record the eighth-highest opening weekend haul in movie history.
While he now lives in Los Angeles, Wells was back in his home state of Colorado for the blockbuster’s release. He attended a few screenings — including one at a theater rented out by a high school friend — over the next few days to make sure the “jokes were landing right.”
“It’s been super fun to see how happy and pumped up people are when they leave the movie theater,” says the 47-year-old writer, director and voice actor.
Growing up in Littleton, Wells was the most passionate comic-book reader in his circle of friends. “After junior high, I was the only one of my friends who was still reading them,” he says.
As the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the most successful franchise in movie history over the last 16 years, Wells has watched his friends, alongside hundreds of millions of people, become increasingly enamored with the characters that lit up his imagination from an early age.
“They all have so many more fans now. Maybe these people don’t read comic books, but they all love the characters,” he says. “It’s been so fun to watch it grow.”
Wells has been a key part of that growth: He’s written episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and was an uncredited co-writer on The Marvels, all while doing extensive work for Marvel Comics since 2002.
[caption id="attachment_107397" align="alignleft" width="252"]
Zeb Wells’ journey to comic book stardom began as a film student at CU Boulder. Courtesy: Zeb Wells[/caption]
Comic relief
Wells’ own creative origin story is linked to Marvel, too. While he was a film student at the CU Boulder, Wells and his friends made videos just to entertain each other. Wizard Magazine, a comic book publication that ran between 1991 and 2011, held a short film contest he decided to enter.
“My friend looked like The Incredible Hulk, so we painted him green and made a whole film about how he lost his job and had to pick up odd jobs,” he says. “It ended with him being a stripper on the street. But we won the contest.”
Wells didn’t know it at the time, but this win would kickstart his screenwriting career. Matthew Senreich, the editorial director of Wizard Entertainment, went on to create the TV show Robot Chicken — remembering the Colorado native’s contest-winning film, Senreich hired him. Wells would write and voice characters on the show between 2007 and 2017 before creating Super-Mansion alongside Senreich, which ran until 2019.
Then in early 2020, Wells was hired by head writer Jessica Gao — who’d also written on Robot Chicken — to join the writers room on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
“She really vouched for me and said she wanted me in there. I owe it all to her,” he says. “Because Wendy Jacobson was a producer on She-Hulk, and she is also the producer of Deadpool & Wolverine.”
When Wells was asked to get involved with the third installment of the Deadpool franchise, Jackman had just decided to return as Wolverine. Alongside Reynolds, director Shawn Levy and the screenwriters behind the first two movies, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, cleared the board and started to write the script from scratch.
“It was super fun. Writing a Deadpool movie with Deadpool in the room is just incredible,” he says. “Both him and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine are so iconic. It was like being able to write a Han Solo movie for Harrison Ford. They’re both just so connected to the characters.”
Nailing Deadpool
After finishing the script, Wells expected to join the production in England to watch his work come to life. But the writers’ strike stopped those plans, something he still feels “fairly heartbroken” about. “I was really hoping to be on set,” he says. “Especially to see Wolverine get in that yellow costume for the first time.”
The massive success of Deadpool & Wolverine has helped to heal that wound, though. Wells says he gets a kick out of watching his jokes being performed on the big screen, especially by Reynolds.
“I know that if he said them, he thought they were funny,” he says. “He can rewrite anything he wants, because he’s hilarious. He knows exactly what the character would say. It’s great to feel like I nailed the Deadpool voice.”
Ultimately, while the budgets have grown exponentially, Wells doesn’t see too much difference between the student filming Marvel homages just to make his friends laugh and what he, Reynolds, Jackman, Levy, Reese and Wernick have created.
“You can write funnier jokes if you really love and have affection for the thing you’re making fun of,” he says “That’s a very big Deadpool thing. He’s irreverent and makes fun of a lot of stuff, but there’s a love, respect and knowledge behind what is being made fun of. That’s really why this was such a dream project for me from start to finish.”
______________
ON SCREEN: Deadpool & Wolverine is out now in wide release.