UPDATE: It turns out that Ryan Reynolds has played an April Fools joke on us, and contrary to our earlier report, it's now been confirmed that Deadpool will in fact be an R-rated movie. You can watch the very special announcement video - courtesy of JoBlo - below:
Reynolds also Tweeted out a pretty funny message to fans, writing:
The original story in its entirety is below.
Since late last year when the Deadpool movie was officially announced, we've been hearing about a constant behind-the-scenes debate regarding the film's target rating. The filmmakers and Ryan Reynolds have publicly declared their desire to make an R-rated feature, though this opinion has evidently been met with a bit of push-back from the folks at 20th Century Fox. There has been a lot of back and forth on this issue, however, the latest update about the situation makes it seem like the studio is on the verge of winning the argument.
The recent news about Deadpool's internal rating war has come to us directly from Ryan Reynolds, who has sent out two Tweets today suggesting that his upcoming comic book movie will be rated PG-13. The first message is a bit more subtle in addressing the issue, though it does very directly express his opinion about the opposition in the debate:
It's pretty clear that Reynolds isn't very happy about the entire situation, but he returned to his social media account a couple hours later to ensure fans that the Deadpool movie is still in proper hands, and that they should be excited for the film regardless of what rating it ends up with.
While I'm sure that there are many fans out there who are going to see this news as being tragic, I personally don't really see it that way. I used to think that an R-rated Deadpool movie was the right direction to go, but looking back at the amazing character-defining work that Joe Kelly did with the Merc With The Mouth in the comics, it's not difficult to see how a PG-13 Deadpool would work just fine. As we discussed on Hero Blend a few weeks back, Wade Wilson is in many ways a cartoon character come to life, and a less restrictive rating can actually accentuate that if done properly. For example, I now fully expect to hear a number of comedic bleeps in the film, not to mention a fourth-wall breaking exercise where Deadpool explains to the audience how studio execs shut down his cursing and violence parade.
We won't actually know the official MPAA rating of Deadpool for a few more months, but regardless of whether or not it's R or PG-13, we look forward to seeing it in theaters on February 12, 2016.
