Deadpool & Wolverine is expected to take its cameo parade all the way to an impressive $1 billion at the box office. But if Ryan Reynolds & Co. had their way, this movie would’ve had even more cameos. Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider was “a conversation.” One pitch included the entire original Avengers line up in a scene together. (As it is, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth both make very different cameos in the film.) And Robert Downey Jr. as his iconic (original) character, Tony Stark, was actually written into the script. 

“Ryan wrote a Downey scene,” co-writer Rhett Reese told The Hollywood Reporter, which was meant to be both Tony Stark and Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). “And then the feeling was, if Downey either decides not to do it, or if Marvel decides not to have him do it, or for whatever reason it doesn’t work out, [it would then] be tailored for Happy Hogan. Jon was amazing about it. He hung in there while it was still undetermined for a little while, and then ultimately, he was very gracious about having it expand out a little bit,” Reese shared. “We did love the idea of Tony Stark being in there, but we also perfectly understand why it didn’t happen given that Downey jumped up on stage and became Dr. Doom not 10 seconds after our movie came out. So it was clear that that was the path that we didn’t realize was the path.”

Speaking with IndieWire, Reese and co-writer Paul Wernick also dished about their other ambitious pitch “that had all the Avengers in the room,” Wernick revealed. “And Wade was rejected and then he dressed all the Avengers down in a way only Deadpool could do.” According to the writers, in this version Deadpool “was going to get mad and basically attack each one of them in a vicious kind of way,” while his teammate Peter (Rob Delaney) casually picked up Thor’s hammer in the background. “There were never screenplay pages, but it was the idea of the scene. I remember pitching that he was going to try to get Captain America to swear,” Reese said.

Well, they did ultimately get Captain America to swear… sort of. It was actually Evans as his previous Marvel character, Johnny Storm, a.k.a. Human Torch from the 2005 Fantastic Four. It was just one of many miscellaneous historic Marvel cameos in Deadpool & Wolverine, in addition to Happy Hogan (Favreau), Thor (Hemsworth), X-23 (Dafne Keene), Blade (Wesley Snipes), Elektra (Jennifer Garner), and Gambit (Channing Tatum). The latter never actually appeared in any Marvel movie before this, but Tatum had been circling the role for various different X-Men related films for almost 20 years. Now that he’s finally brought his vision for Gambit to the big screen, Reese and Wernick are rooting for a Gambit solo movie. Tatum is rooting for it too: “I’ve been saying I want it for the last 10 years,” he recently told Variety. “It’s in Bob Iger and Kevin Feige’s hands. I pray to God.”