Taika Waititi might be making waves with Thor: Ragnarok this year, but the New Zealand director has more than one hit to his name. 2014's What We Do in the Shadows was raucously funny, but it's 2016's Hunt for the Wilderpeople that truly managed to amaze.
For fans of that film, the news that Julian Dennison (Ricky Baker, once rejected, now accepted), will have a part to play in Deadpool will no doubt be exciting. He was brilliant in that film as Ricky, a teenager abandoned by society and forced to adapt to extraordinary circumstances during his adolescence, so it would make sense for him to play a mutant, seeing as how those two elements are part and parcel of any X-Man's teenage years.
We know not yet what character Dennison is playing, but he looks to be handy with fire. Scouring through the database to find fire-bound mutants hasn't yielded many potential candidates for the role, but - even if it is a new creation - it's great to see Ricky Baker accepted once more.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
