[Editor’s note: The following post contains spoilers for “Deadpool & Wolverine.”] One of the highlights of “Deadpool & Wolverine” was the climactic Ant-Man Arena battle. That’s where Deadpool ( Ryan Reynolds ) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) team up with Elektra (Jennifer Garner), X-23 (Dafne Keen), Blade (Wesley Snipes), and Gambit (Channing Tatum) to fight Cassandra Nova’s (Emma Corwin) henchmen.
But the memorably wintry look was not planned. That’s because they were supposed to shoot the battle last summer at Pinewood Studios but got delayed by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. When production resumed in December, the U.
K.’s bleak skies weren’t what they had planned for. Plus, they now had snow to contend with.
ILM was in charge of VFX for the battle (under the supervision of Vincent Papaix), so they brainstormed with Marvel production VFX supervisor Swen Gillberg to figure out how they could change the look. “I was on set one day where the stuntmen in costume were doing some rehearsal and we shot a wide angle shot and a very tight shot with one set of lighting and one with natural light,” Papaix told IndieWire. “Also, it was very cold [33 degrees] on the set, so when people talked, they had smoky breath, which was not part of the script.
So they were asking if we could remove the breath. And I’m like, we can, but it’s very time-consuming, and it’s going to be a lot.” Gillberg and Papaix proposed a test where they shot in natural gray and ambien.