Movie and comic book fans likely know the road to the screen that has been the Deadpool film. It’s been such a wild ride that it’s a near miracle that the movie was ever made. This was a passion project for Ryan Reynolds, however, and he kept fighting for it, even when wall after wall seemed to go up as he tried to get it done.
This movie died so many times that it didn’t even look like a mutant healing factor was ever going to save it. Reynolds talks to Yahoo Movies about the trials and tribulations that he and others went through trying to make it happen. From the absolutely terrible handling of the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine to the fact that it looked like nobody would ever hire Reynolds to play a superhero again following the bomb that was Green Lantern, Reynolds' description of the entire experience is painful. As much as the actor wanted to make the film, he admits he got to a point where he was ready to give up.
There was a time when I thought, 'I just gotta let it go.’ It was like the worst relationship I’d ever been in. It was on-off, on-off, you know?
The whole thing does sound like a bad relationship. The Deadpool idea had already been in development hell when New Line put the property in turnaround in 2005, a financial plan where a studio tries to recoup its production cost by selling off the rights. That’s not even development hell anymore, that’s development limbo. This was followed by a Deadpool who couldn’t speak, in the first Wolverine movie. How that idea made it through production is still mind boggling. Then, in 2011, Ryan Reynolds said the light at the end of the tunnel was "faint" following his turn as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern. Both the actor and the character were on the outs in cinematic superhero land.
The idea almost certainly would have died if the test footage that Reynolds shot with director Tim Miller hadn’t leaked online. To this day, nobody admits to having been the one to do it but the footage burned through the internet like wildfire and sparked the imaginations of fans who saw Deadpool exactly as he was supposed to be on film. The popularity of the footage gave the film life again, and now it’s almost real.
The Deadpool movie will be out in February, and it promises to be just as funny, violent, filthy and fun as the comic book it’s based on. No sewn-up mouths, and no CGI costumes.
