20th Century Fox has been taking its sweet time making a movie starring Ryan Reyolds as Marvel Comics’ “Merc with a Mouth,” Deadpool, following his appearance in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but with a popular Marvel Now! comic and a video game on the way, one would think now would be the best time to move forward with the movie. There’s already a script written by Zombieland creators Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese and FX guy Tim Miller has been attached to direct the movie for some time as well, so what is happening with it?
In an Empire Podcast appearance by Reynolds to talk about his upcoming DreamWorks Animation film The Croods, Reynolds explained why it may be a long time before we see the movie they want to make:
“I love Deadpool and there is a script thats in development. But its so, so far into the R-rated zone its a nearly NC-17 world and I just dont know if the studio would ever risk their reputation doing it. Weve been developing it and we would never wanna do it unless you could it that R-rated way, so... You could do it for a pittance compared to the modern sort of epic scale superhero movies, but its about a guy who knows hes in a movie and knows hes in a comic book who is deeply mentally disturbed and hyper violent, and thats tough to get by a studio.”
Probably the most interesting thing Reynolds tells them is that the movie might even address the odd version of Deadpool seen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, something which angered many fans of the popular Marvel character.
“In the current iteration of the script, it doesnt address Wolverine though it does address Deadpools appearance in Wolverine. Deadpool was not happy with Deadpool in Wolverine. He has a sort of a WTF!? moment with that. The script is one rewrite away from Deadpool jumping across the desk at the studio executive and attacking him,” Reynolds told them.
The planning for a Deadpool movie, which Empire surmises may need to generate a Kickstarter campaign to ever happen, even goes so far as them throwing around a few marketing ideas, as Reynolds said, “Ive always wanted to do the movie just if only because Deadpool would get to do his own movie trailer, so thats a thing that we were dying to do and we would love to be a part of that.”
You can hear the Empire Podcast below with Reynolds jumping in around the 48:50 mark.