Wolverine’s live-action mask had to contend with VFX and the fandom

Fans and filmmakers have been feuding over what Wolverine’s costume should look like in live action since the first X-Men movie ditched his bumblebee-colored comics costume in favor of black leather, then lampshaded the change with some only-for-fans character snark. (X-Men ’97 recently referenced that moment and flipped the script.) A deleted scene in 2013’s The Wolverine teased what Wolverine’s classic comic suit might look like in live -action, but he didn’t actually suit up until 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine — which still has the characters bantering about whether yellow-and-black leather is a good look for him.

But where the characters have room to joke about Wolverine’s sartorial choices, Wētā FX’s VFX supervisor Daniel Macarin had to figure out how to make it actually work on screen. In Deadpool & Wolverine, Hugh Jackman finally dons the dreaded “yellow spandex” — including his mask, a dramatic cowl-with-metal-wings jobbie that adamantly wasn’t designed for live-action movies. Macarin says step one of making that mask believable on film was convincing director Shawn Levy and the producers to let Wētā tackle it at all.

“The first challenge was selling the idea of letting us do it,” Macarin told Polygon in an interview after the film’s release. “When they showed us some of the sequences and we saw the mask, we were like, Oh, my God! This fan was like, Yes! This is it! You’re as excited as the audience members are — but then you’re looking at it like, I need to be a part of this. I need to make this better. What can I do?”

Macarin says producer/co-writer Ryan Reynolds, who plays Deadpool, was all in for Wētā’s involvement, but “half of the camp was like, You know, no. Let’s do a test.” A long series of tests and discussions followed, involving “little cosmetic details […] that we wanted to enhance or make better, just to make sure that people fell in love with the mask and believed it as much as possible.” The process took time, but “slowly, we overtook all of the people who weren’t sure about it, and then everyone was in. And that was a really great moment.”

Wētā has been the VFX outlet behind Deadpool’s masked facial expressions since the first Deadpool in 2016, and on all three movies, the scenes with Deadpool and his costumed allies have used practical, on-set costume masks with digital tweaking. Macarin confirms that the production process hasn’t changed as Deadpool has moved from 20th Century Fox to Disney, even though Disney-produced superhero movies are known for managing superhero costumes through heavy CG alterations — or making them entirely digital effects.

“Ryan has been very particular in keeping the team that he loves, and the people who have dedicated so much time and energy into this series,” Macarin says. “Marvel trusted him and Shawn, the director, so much [...] What was shown on the internet very early on with Wolverine’s costume, I think that was addressing people’s concerns: We’re not doing this digitally. We’re in these suits. We’re doing it. It’s our bodies. We bring life to these characters as much as we can, and you’re going to see it. So we didn’t really have any talks about going digital.”

If anything, the opposite was true: The filmmakers were worried whether digitally enhancing Wolverine’s mask might make it seem artificial, especially given the mask’s black “wings.” “If we moved those wing tips the way we move the black leather on Deadpool’s mask, it’d quickly feel cartoony,” Macarin says. “And we don’t want people getting into those conversations of, Was the mask digital? It looks animated. It doesn’t fit with Hugh’s performance.”

That problem was solved by applying different digital rules to the different materials that make up his masks. “[The] metal moves very, very little, and most of the time, not at all,” Macarin says. “His yellow fabric moves quite a bit. And that’s where you’ll see the wrinkles and expression come, more in the yellow areas. And then we can move the eyes underneath the metal a little bit. You can’t move it dramatically.”

Figuring out how to approach Wolverine’s eyes, on the other hand, wasn’t a logistics or physics problem, but about appeasing the fans.

“We had to do this test of whether to go pure fan service and go with some classic comic book Wolverine eyes — they have a very large slant and curve on the top of the eye,” Macarin says. “So being very nerdy, we bring every comic book reference out, we put it in there, we give him the comic book look. And we’re like, Oh my God, as a still frame, that looks so cool! [But] it does not look cool in motion. It gives it a comic look that isn’t the same visual style as the film.

“So we started ramping it back, like, OK, let’s have 100% comic, then 50% comic, and then we can reduce it and find that balance of what allows his eyes to still move with the emotion of Hugh’s performance. But we didn’t [want to make it look] as animated as a cartoon series.”

Macarin says Reynolds periodically called the Wētā team to ask for tweaks and experiments on Deadpool’s facial expressions — but Jackman didn’t have the same kinds of requests, for practical reasons.

“He’s more limited than Ryan is, because we can see his face,” Macarin says. “It’s not like he can say, Hey, I want to try a different line. I’m not turning [his] face digi and doing a new facial performance. We kind of have to stick with what [he] did on the day.”

Instead, all the tweaks — and arguments — came from inside Macarin’s opinionated, Wolverine-loving team.

“I grew up with the original X-Men cartoon, so I love that look,” he says. “We have a lot of Wolverine statues and toys and things around on our desks. So there was an abundance of reference we went through, and a lot of arguments about how far to take it, [from] just the love of this character and everyone wanting it to be a certain way. So finding a balance to his comic style was enjoyable, but tricky. People know and love this character. They take it personally. And you have to watch for that.”

Deadpool & Wolverine is in theaters now.