Last year’s colossal smash Deadpool was sold on its gleeful crassness, violence and how darn cuddly Ryan Reynolds as the wiseass antihero is about the whole affair. After all, the next Spider-Man movie isn’t going to have a marketing campaign that features a jizz joke on the side of buses and that’s a-okay. With Logan being gobbled up by audiences, R-rated superhero fare is very much en vogue these days, but the writers of the decidedly un-PG presentation of the “Merc with a Mouth” are confident you’d go to see the movie even if there wasn’t hard R levels of sex, violence and saucy language.

Deadpool‘s writing duo of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick chatted about Wade Wilson’s wheelings and dealings with ComingSoon and shared that a PG-13 version of the film could have worked. In Reese’s view, it’s Deadpool and not the extra naughty stuff that he does that hooks moviegoers.

“I think a lot of people just felt like the R rating had everything to do with it,” offered Reese. “While I agree to a certain extent, I personally feel like a PG-13 Deadpool still would have succeeded, because I think it’s more about the character. You can’t just slap an R rating on something and have it be good. That’s definitely one element of a lot of other elements. I think people are attributing a little too much to that. That said, having the ability to break those rules with an R rating did help us.”

A rather sensible assessment, don’t you think? Heck, InAPPropriate Comedy was presented as none-more-edge and it was as warmly received as barf in the church collection plate.

As for what the Deadpool 2 teaser says about the next instalment, Reese acknowledges that it’s content is more of a gleefully goofy one-off.

“If you look at the plot, abandoning an innocent man as he tries to get dressed, that’s probably something that doesn’t fit into a movie,” he explained. “It wouldn’t work in the logic of a movie, but Deadpool affords us the opportunity to break rules, always. We just thought, “Let’s make a silly short that doesn’t really happen to Deadpool.” We don’t really like to adhere to any rules in Deadpool. Even the tone can be more absurd if we feel like it’s funny. That was our goal there.”

Deadpool 2 appears to be landing at some point in 2018. Don’t count on a surprise PG-13 rating, mind you.

(Via ComingSoon & ScreenCrush)