He’s had three attempts at being a comic book hero, and all three ended up critical and box-office disappointments.
Now, Ryan Reynolds says he’s still keen on returning to one of those roles – but isn’t likely to be back for the other.
The one he’s still up for is the role of Deadpool, which Reynolds played in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”. A stand-alone Deadpool movie has been in development for a few years, but hasn’t progressed much despite “Zombieland” scribes Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese having already penned a script.
This week, Reynolds explained why in an Empire podcast:
““I love Deadpool and there is a script that’s in development. But it’s so, so far into the R-rated zone… it’s a nearly NC-17 world and I just don’t know if the studio would ever risk their reputation doing it.
We’ve been developing it and we would never wanna do it unless you could it that R-rated way, so the script has a similar tone [to Zombieland], almost. Reese and Wernick wrote it and they developed it as well and, you know, it’s sitting there.
You could do it for a pittance compared to the modern sort of epic scale superhero movies, but it’s about a guy who knows he’s in a movie and knows he’s in a comic book who is deeply mentally disturbed and hyper violent. And that’s tough to get by a studio.
Reynolds adds that this version of the character would not fit within the Deadpool story from Wolverine.
That character would really sully that whole world. The script is one rewrite away from Deadpool jumping across the desk at the studio executive and attacking him. But I’ve always wanted to do the movie if only because Deadpool would get to do his own movie trailer.
So that’s a thing that we were dying to do and we would love to be a part of that. I don’t know how it would fit though, no. In the current iteration of the script, it doesn’t address Wolverine – though it does address Deadpool’s appearance in Wolverine. Deadpool was not happy with Deadpool in Wolverine. He has a sort of a WTF!? moment with that.
Asked about the current state of the “Justice League” film and whether he would return as Green Lantern, Reynolds did not sound particularly keen:
I don’t know. If you’re gonna do comic book movies in that vein, you really have to get them right. I believe that Joss Whedon is the guy that just nails it and Christopher Nolan obviously nails it. So if they were gonna do it like that, it would be an interesting thing to do.
It’s just that… working on Green Lantern, I saw how difficult it is make that concept palatable, and how confused it all can be when you don’t really know exactly where you’re going with it or you don’t really know how to access that world properly – that world comic book fans have been accessing for decades and falling in love with.
So at this point I have very little interest in joining that kind of world. But, you know, a great script and a good director can always turn that around.
About The Critic
