Ryan Reynolds talks DEADPOOL's "nearly NC-17" script and how he's not interested in JUSTICE LEAGUE

Ryan Reynolds sure has come a long way since his Van Wilder days. Instead of a just pretty boy funnyman, he’s now a pretty boy funnyman that gets paid millions of dollars. But despite his current elevated Hollywood status, there’s one film project that he’s just been unable to get off the ground: a Deadpool solo film.

Reynolds already played a version of the sorta superhero character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and despite popular belief, the fact that that version sucked beyond description may not actually be what’s keeping the spinoff in developmental limbo.

As part of a rather length interview with Empire, Reynolds addressed the status of the film and what’s holding it back.

“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 [do] it that R-rated way, so…”

That script comes courtesy of the pens of Zombieland writers Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick, and Reynolds indicates that the duo’s darkly comic zombie flick has quite the influence on Deadpool

“Deadpool’s got a similar tone almost. They 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.”

If that description of Deadpool takes you by surprise, then chances are that your only exposure to the character was in the aforementioned Wolverine train wreck, where they took a motormouth, wise cracking, fourth wall breaking, over the top violent, gun toting mutant antihero and turned him into a mute henchman with Cyclops’ eye beams, swords in his arms and a head shaped like an upside down butternut. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

So how would that lame duck version of the character match up with this newly proposed truer version? Well it wouldn’t. Kind of.

“I don’t think you can do that, because 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.”

Now that sounds like the Deadpool we all know and love! Just make that and we’ll all be happy, Fox executives. At least give Reynolds a chance to redeem himself after he helped massacre a second fan favourite comic book character in the (very well deserved) much maligned Green Lantern. Now to be fair to Reynolds though, he was surprisingly decent in the role of Hal Jordan, the cocky test pilot who finds a crashed alien spaceship that kicks off a journey that sees him becoming a member of the intergalactic peacekeeping force, the Green Lantern Corps. The problem was that everything else around him was horrible.

So if you, like me, were holding your breath in hope that maybe Reynolds would get a second chance at the character in Justice League, DC’s own answer to Marvel’s superhero team-up success story, The Avengers, then you may be holding that breath until you’re green in the face. Seems that Reynolds is not very confident in DC/Warner Bros’ current ability to pull it off, and with all the recent reported troubles with the flick, who can blame him.

“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.”

Well, if rumours are to be believed, Warner Bros are so pleased with director Zack Snyder and producer Christopher Nolan’s efforts on Superman reboot Man of Steel that they may be handing over the Justice League reins to them. Now way back, when it was first announced that Green Lantern was going to get made, I was seriously lobbying for Snyder to get the job as his skill with large scaled, CGI heavy spectacle would be perfect for GL’s world. So who knows? Maybe that will actually happen with Reynolds under the (seriously dodgy CG) mask again. Just please, for the love of all that is holy, give the man some proper boots and not that green toed travesty we had to sit through the last time!

Now, if you’re a fan of Reynolds, or even just a fan of really enjoyable interviews, then I suggest you check out the whole article over at Empire. Among plenty of other topics, Reynolds talks about the physical suffering he went through while filming Buried (he needed to hug his mom for 4 days straight afterward), the possibility of a Safe House sequel (possibly in the works), doing voiceover work for The Croods (an easy two hour gig) and making out with Patrick Warbuton (because Seth McFarlane just asked him to).

Last Updated: March 25, 2013