Despite the crazy success that Deadpool was in the theaters — making over $750 million in its $58 million budget — Deadpool 2 didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts. You’d expect that, on the heels of such an overwhelmingly positive response, the filmmakers would be holding hands and skipping through the daisies. Unfortunately, that didn’t appear to be the case, and soon after development began on the superhero sequel, Deadpool director Tim Miller departed from the project.

20th Century Fox, however, did not sit idly by. They quickly went to work in search of a new director, and went on to hire David Leitch, the uncredited co-director of John Wick. Given John Wick’s low budget and stylized nature, it seemed like a perfect fit that one of the talents involved in bringing that picture to life would make his way over to a Deadpool film. However, despite this new director, we were no closer to knowing when the studio planned to release Deadpool 2, or if they were anywhere close to finishing the script. All we heard were a couple of offhand comments from screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick saying they were on track to shoot this year.

Well, the eagle-eyed folks over at Omega Underground are now reporting that both aVancouver production site and My Entertainment World have a start date listed for the production of Deadpool 2. That start date? May 1, 2017. Just as Reese and Wernick stated, this film will be starting right in the middle of the year.

This brings forth the ultimate question: When can we expect a release date? 20th Century Fox is wise to keep that date to themselves until they’re underway into production, but let’s go ahead and speculate. If we take a look at the original Deadpool, it began production in March and was released the following February. If we can expect a similar scope with this movie, it seems like Deadpool 2 may be on track for an April or May release date in 2018. Of course, it’s difficult to make a one-to-one comparison, as there will always be slight differences in production difficulties, and Fox would need to look closely and decide if Deadpool is a movie that could perform as well in the actual summer movie season.

As of right now, the only real competition in April 2018 are Rampage and the currently-untitled Universal Monster Franchise Film. May, however, has two behemoths in the form of the Han Solo spinoff and Avengers: Infinity War. With that in mind, they’d do well to avoid that month. So with all that in mind, if we were to predict a Deadpool 2 release date, we’d predict either March 30 or April 6. The former would put itup against Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, and the latter would only separate it one week from Universal’s Monster movie. It seems to be an inevitability, however, that it would have competition in some form. In today’s world, however, the “summer movie season” creeps ever closer to the front of the year, and unless they’ve done some really great planning, we think it unlikely another February release (which could be its ideal release) is in the cards.

What do you think of Deadpool 2’s potential production start date? When do you think it should hit theaters? Let us know in the comments down below!

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SOURCE: My Entertainment World (via Omega Underground), MovieInsider