Once Upon A Deadpool Trailer: Wade Wilson Recruits A Kidnapped Fred Savage As His Sidekick

Deadpool's coming back, and this time, he's giving zero Fs.

No, seriously — the usually foul-mouthed anti-hero literally won't drop any F-bombs, since he's returning to theaters for a special PG-13 version of Deadpool 2. 

Studio 20th Century Fox dropped the official trailer for the upcoming family-friendly re-cut, formally titled Once Upon a Deadpool, on Monday to give the masses a taste of the toned-down take on the Merc with a Mouth-starring sequel. 

Keeping true to Wade Wilson's penchant for both mockery and subversion, the footage opens on a flurry of Deadpool-themed snowflakes fluttering through the night sky as Ryan Reynolds delivers a line meant to mimic the dulcet tones of a Christmas movie voiceover. It then takes a swift turn into the semi-inane. 

"Right before Christmas, a good guy in red is coming to theaters with his new sidekick, Fred," Reynolds says before the camera cuts to an annoyed Fred Savage, who wonders aloud why he's sitting in a bedroom that looks exactly like the one from The Princess Bride, the film in which he starred as a young boy whose grandfather told him a fantastical tale of princesses, villains, sword-fights, and rescue missions (and censored out the violence along the way, of course). 

Reynolds' Deadpool explains that Savage is in "a PG-13 version of Deadpool, filtered through the prism of childlike innocence." Though Savage protests, insisting that he's a grown man and his days of juvenile purity are long behind him, the Merc with a Mouth states that "nobody does childlike innocence" like Savage does. And even if Savage wanted to cut ties with Deadpool and the cleaned-up cut of the sequel, he can't: Deadpool kidnapped him and duct-taped his legs to the bed. 

But makeshift shackles can't keep Savage from striking back at Deadpool, delivering a burn of the highest degree when he says that the leather-clad vigilante isn't as great as Marvel superheroes. 

"Kinda prefer Marvel movies," Savage quips. "You're, you know, Marvel licensed by Fox. It's like if The Beatles were produced by Nickelback. It's music, but it sucks!"

Yeesh, where's Peter's unwavering kindness when you need it?

Check out the full trailer above. 

Everything we had heard about Once Upon a Deadpool prior to this trailer reveal was incredibly interesting: it's a somewhat-sanitized cut of Deadpool 2... that features a framing story reminiscent of The Princess Bride... that will debut in a limited-time-only theatrical run at the height of the holiday season... that will donate $1 to F*** Cancer (renamed Fudge Cancer for the movie event) for every ticket sold. We, and countless others, were hooked from the get-go. And now that we've actually seen what the PG-13 version will look like — and have gotten a peak at footage of the eight framing scenes that Reynolds, Savage, and director David Leitch shot "in a single hectic day of guerrilla-style filmmaking" — we're more intrigued than ever before. 

Though the thought of Deadpool getting censored to meet PG-13 rating criteria might still put some people off, it's pretty important to the success of the film franchise now that the Walt Disney Company is completing its acquisition of Fox, which will see several Fox-owned heroes and villains be housed under Marvel Studios. Chatter in the industry back channels suggests that Fox and Marvel are actually using Once Upon a Deadpool as a soft test of sorts to see how moviegoers will respond to a cleaner version of one of the raunchiest heroes out there. If fans dig it, Deadpool will have no trouble fitting into the more family-friendly Marvel Cinematic Universe once the merger deal is finalized. If they don't and Once Upon a Deadpool somehow flops, Marvel will have a big problem on its hands.

Once Upon a Deadpool will open in theaters on December 12. It ends its theatrical engagement on December 24, the day before Christmas.