2009 seemingly saw an end to the Great Leading Man Shortage of much of the last decade, with the likes of Sam Worthington and Bradley Cooper stepping up to the A-List and seemingly attaching themselves to more things than a velcro cluster bomb. But perhaps the busiest of them all is Ryan Reynolds who, having been a nearly-man for some time, converted the immense success of rom-com “The Proposal” into a spate of high-profile leads; from superhero flick/impending train wreck “Green Lantern,” animated “The Croods,” body-swap comedy “The Change Up,” spy thriller “Safe House,” a reteam with Sandra Bullock in “Most Wanted,” an untitled cop comedy with Bradley Cooper and the supernatural buddy cop movie “R.I.P.D.”
But the actor’s real passion project appears to be “Deadpool,” in which he would reprise his cameo from “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” as the wisecracking Marvel mercenary (despite his decapitation at the end of that film). The film now has a script, from “Zombieland” scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and a potential director in Robert Rodriguez, but as yet there’s no start date. That hasn’t stopped Reynolds from sitting down with Hero Complex to discuss the project which will hopefully shoot next year.
Any fears that the character’s darker moments would be toned down seem to be being put to rest, as Reynolds says of the script “It’s a nasty piece of work. It’s just based in so much emotional filth, completely. It’s like “Barfly” if it were a superhero movie. It sort of treads into the world of an emotionally damaged person. I always say that Deadpool is a guy in a highly militarized shame spiral… It’s so different than the superhero movies to date, it departs so far from that.”
Reynolds does stress that the film will be accessible, however: “There’s a gamble to it— you’re going to lose a few people right at the beginning but you take the gamble and know that eventually you’re going to win them back… We have to play to a broader audience than that. As an actor you have to be willing to do something like… back in Vancouver we used to call it a [nasty] burger. ‘You gotta eat the [nasty] burger to get to the cookies.” We’re not 100% sure what Reynolds is talking about here, but it sounds filthy.
Either way, it sounds like the project could be a breath of fresh air for the increasingly tired superhero genre, and if Reynolds lives up to his promises for the project, it could be darker and more interesting than we were expecting. The film won’t hit theaters until 2012 at the earliest, so we’ve got a while to wait, though.