Ryan Reynolds Discusses DEADPOOL and GREEN LANTERN Issues
Deadpool is finally being developed as a feature film. Fans have been waiting for this for a very long time, and thanks to the awesome test footage that leaked online, Fox finally has the balls to move forward with it and has admitted to themselves that they might have a successful franchise on their hands.
I’m seriously surprised that it took them so long to figure that out. During an interview with Yahoo UK, Ryan Reynolds talked about the Deadpool movie and the leaked footage which he credits with getting the film greenlit. When asked how the project finally got pushed through, he said,
"Exclusively the leaked test footage, 100 percent."
Who leaked the footage is still a mystery, and Reynolds claims that he doesn’t know. Asked who he thought it was, he replied,
“I would have, if I had known it would have caused that! Honestly, we all thought Tim Miller, the director, had leaked it. But I have since investigated that enough, in quiet moments when he was beyond the point of being penalized by anybody, and he said that he really didn’t do it. The initial [leak] came from Fox they think — someone recorded the footage on their iPhone and then released it. And then once that happened, somebody hacked into Blurred Studios and got the original footage in high-res and put it online.”
It’s hard to believe that it wasn't someone within the production team. They had to have done it knowing that it would light a fire under Fox’s ass. As for whether Reynolds was nervous or excited when he saw the footage online, he explained,
"I was excited, because you can look back at an email chain from all of us, the core group involved in Deadpool, saying 'We should leak this, f***er,' like three years ago. Saying, 'Hey, if this thing is going to stagnate, one of us should just say 'Whoops, I slipped it online by accident.' And nobody seemed to want to nut up and do that, myself included. Someone did it for us, years later, when we all completely assumed it was dead in the water.
“Now, we get to make the movie. We don’t get to make it with the budget of most superhero movies, but we get to make it the way we want to make it, so that’s even more exciting than having a catered lunch.”
Well, a big thank you to whoever did leak it when all was thought to be lost. Reynolds is perfect for this role, and he’s going to absolutely kill it as the insane Marvel character. He was fantastic for the short amount of time he was Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
The conversation then moved on to Green Lantern and what he learned from that superhero movie production that he could bring to Deadpool.
“Well, script. When we shot Green Lantern, nobody auditioning for the role of Green Lantern was given the opportunity to read the script, because the script didn’t exist. I’m not complaining about it — it was an opportunity of a lifetime, and if I were to go back and retrace my steps, I would probably do everything the exact same way. But script, that’s what’s different on this one.
“We’ve had a script for three years. The script got leaked, and people even loved that. That says a lot — if you can create a script around a comic-book character that is directly within the canon of the character and be embraced. That’s a huge step in the right direction. I’ve since learned that a lot of superhero movies don’t really have a fully functioning draft of the screenplay ready until they’re already well into shooting.”
I think we can all agree that Green Lantern wasn’t Reynolds' fault. He did the best he could with the material he had to work with. That was a studio film that was made by a committee, and films like that tend to turn out like crap. It’s a good thing they have full control of Deadpool, and they get to make it the way they want.
Deadpool hits theaters on February 12th, 2016.