The movie Ryan Reynolds regretted making: “Maybe it turned out exactly how they wanted”
To a large extent, we now live in a world orchestrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Donald Trump. But we also live in a world dominated by a Canadian without realising quite how much Ryan Reynolds is there, often behind the scenes, pulling strings, and making absolutely ridiculous amounts of money.
Reynolds is the embodiment of the phrase “it takes money to make money”, but to be fair, he is very, very good at it. And he has done it, in the main, by being incredibly entertaining and making people laugh and being quite self-deprecating, which means you can’t really get angry with him about it.
It’s a clever ruse indeed. At the latest glance, Reynolds, aside from being a Hollywood A-lister movie star commanding a pay cheque of around $20million per movie, is the founder and owner of a marketing company called Maximum Effort, with an annual turnover of $36m. Aside from this, he has various stakes in a range of business ventures, from phone companies to sports, and more, raking in the millions; he’s doing alright.
Reynolds has also, of course, made a good number of fantastic films which have grossed some $6.5billion over the years and have included some crackers like the Deadpool series, 2010’s Buried and the clever family sci-fi romp Free Guy from 2021.
That isn’t to say he hasn’t been responsible for a few stinkers in his time, too, as he freely admits. For one, there was the absolutely lamentable buddy cop comedy RIPD with Jeff Bridges, and the abysmal superhero flick Green Lantern from 2011, which was neatly summed up by one reviewer simply saying, “Please, please, please don’t make a sequel”.
Amidst the trash chute, there was a movie that even Reynolds himself felt apologetic for putting into the public realm: the 2015 sci-fi thriller Self/Less co-starring the usually very good Ben Kingsley, who really shouldn’t have agreed to it. Telling the story of a billionaire tycoon who is dying and wants to have his conscience transferred to a younger body, the film was panned on release.
Asked by GQ about what it’s like to see a movie flop, Reynolds said, “It’s always weird. Like, you know, it sounds like a cliché, but the journey is the reward… Movies are an intersection of a number of different talents, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t, and it’s just…are you asking, like, am I lying awake at night going, ‘Why didn’t that work?’ No. Not at all.”
When asked about Self/Less specifically, which struggled to break even at the box office, he added, “…the movie didn’t turn out as well as I think I wanted, or (director) Tarsem wanted. But, you know, at the same time, I can’t speak for them. Maybe it turned out exactly how they wanted it.”
The actor must not have lost too much sleep over it, seeing he can always dry those tears with a crisp dollar bill. In the meantime, he’ll follow up last year’s big hit Deadpool & Wolverine with several new projects, including a rumoured Detective Pikachu sequel. He also teased a possible involvement in the new Avengers: Doomsday movie, which is currently in production.
