Ryan Reynolds might be the face of Marvel’s “Deadpool,” but with a friend like “Deadpool & Wolverine” filmmaker Shawn Levy already in the “Star Wars” business, he’s not about giving his own two cents. In a recent The Box Office Podcast episode with Scott Mendelson, the actor revealed that he pitched a “Star Wars” movie to Lucasfilm and Disney.
“My pitch to Disney, I said like, ‘Why don’t we do that R-rated Star Wars property and it doesn’t have to be like an overt A+ characters,” Reynolds said in a conversation that started about the emotional investment an audience has to put into a theatrical movie and a streaming movie you watch at home.
“There’s a wide range of characters you could use, and I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar, R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion,” he explained.
Reynolds quickly noted that his pitch wasn’t for him to star in, and it would have been something he could produce and oversee.
“I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that,” he remarked. “I’m not saying I want to be in it. That would be a bad fit. I would want to produce, write, or be a part of, behind the scenes. And those kinds of IP subsist really well on scarcity and surprise, we don’t get scarcity really with ‘Star Wars’ because there’s a deep [bench of content on] Disney Plus, but you can certainly still surprise people.”
As to what that pitch was exactly and even the vaguest plot, Reynolds didn’t offer, and the interviewer didn’t ask, so we’ll have to speculate and wonder.
Talk shifted to Reynolds’ flagship franchise “Deadpool” and the comedic actor confessed he considered killing off the merc with the mouth in the last film.
“There is always a thought of killing Deadpool,” he admitted.” “The last one again— it’s like listening to the movie. Me, Shane Reid, Dean Zimmerman—the editors, and Sean Levy must have reworked that third act for 45 days.”
“It was [composer] Rob Simonson who really helped us get there by blending, scoring, needle drop and all these things that gave you that feeling,” he continued.
Reynolds also suggested that while they considered offing him, Marvel and Disney wanted to keep him around.
“Studios, of course, are like, ‘It’d be fun to play around with this guy in the future because he’s a cheat code. You can say thing that everyone might be thinking and it gets you out of trouble, but so kind of valuable for that reason.’ But I also love playing him, and I never feel freer; it’s like clown work. It’s all my body, voice, micro facial expressions under the mask.”
Listen to the whole conversation below and hope Ryan Reynolds slides into your DMs one day like he did this journalist.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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