Expressway Cab Ride | MCU Location Scout

I’ve been waiting one year, three weeks, six days and, oh…14 minutes to make him fix what he did to me.

The film opens in the middle of the story as Deadpool takes a cab ride, provided by the seemingly innocent Dopinder, to the middle of an expressway where Wade plans to attack a motorcade.

Deadpool is known for having filmed in the Vancouver area, so discovering that all of the footage outside the windows was filmed in Detroit was a little surprising. Well maybe not too surprising since Cinefex 146 describes the world as “a pre-‘post-apocalyptic’ Detroit.”

The city shut down the John C Lodge Freeway (the M-10, both north and south) to allow the production to gather the necessary plates to use for this sequence. Ryan Reynolds and Karan Soni never actually set foot in Michigan, as all of the various driving sequences, here and later in the film, were filmed on a soundstage with giant LED panels broadcasting the footage.

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There’s no set path that the cab ride takes, instead various shots seem to hop around the freeway. The location on the map above indicates the view outside Deadpool’s window in the opening shot (at the top of the page). A few other significant locations are shown below.

The direction of the shot below is flopped left to right.

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That’s the Joe Louis Arena in the background of the third image below. It was closed in July 2017, shortly after this film was released, and demolished two years later.