The movie Ryan Reynolds was blackmailed into making: “That was the way it was floated to me”
These days, Ryan Reynolds is successful and influential enough within the industry to make whatever kind of movie he wants and play any character he sees fit; newfound power he’s apparently decided to leverage by making a string of action-packed comedies where he plays Ryan Reynolds.
It’s hard to say that it hasn’t worked when his filmography continues ringing up impressive totals at the box office, even if it’s all starting to feel a little stale. Hey, remember that Ryan Reynolds movie released within the last decade or so where he plays a whip-smart, sardonic, sarcastic, and wisecracking hero who loves dropping a quip just as much as they do saving the world or defeating the bad guys?
Is that a reference to Safe House, RIPD, the Deadpool trilogy, The Hitman’s Bodyguard and its sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Detective Pikachu, Free Guy, Red Notice, The Adam Project, or IF? Obviously, it’s a trick question because the answer is all of them. Of course, Reynolds had to ensure his fair share of failures before he reached the Hollywood mountaintop, and one of them stung more than the rest.
It boggles the mind that nobody wanted to make a Deadpool movie despite all three instalments breaking records and becoming the highest-grossing R-rated release in cinema history, with the triptych’s running box office totalling almost $3billion. Reynolds did, of course, but he had to jump through one particularly shitty hoop to do it when 20th Century Fox essentially used blackmail as a bargaining chip.
The actor had been quietly developing a standalone film for the character since 2004, only for Fox to decide five years later that it wanted to debut Wade Wilson in Hugh Jackman’s first solo superhero flick, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Reynolds smelled trouble, but when push came to shove, he had no choice.
When the Los Angeles Times suggested that the main reason he signed on to play the part in Origins was because Fox threatened to pull the plug on his passion project and get another actor in his place, he didn’t disagree. “That was sort of the way it was floated to me,” Reynolds said. “But you never know what’s being discussed behind closed doors.”
Signing on to any film out of fear is never a wise idea, but by his own admission, Reynolds was “under the impression that it was ‘either play Deadpool in this iteration or someone else will’, so, of course, I signed on.” If he wasn’t the person playing it, then the studio had no issues drafting someone else in, which would have cut his dreams of a standalone feature off at the knees.
Unsurprisingly, the star has almost nothing positive to say about Origins other than the fact it introduced him to Jackman for the first time, but at least he got around to that Deadpool movie eventually.
