By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | February 15, 2016 |
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | February 15, 2016 |
It was a good weekend for Ryan Reynolds, whose Deadpool — once considered all but dead — finally hit theaters and opened with the biggest weekend for an R-Rated movie of all time, the largest President’s Day opening weekend, and the largest opening ever for a first-time director (Tim Miller).
Remember four years ago, when Bill Simmons wrote that Ryan Reynolds would never be a real movie star who could open a movie on his own?
Suck it, Bill Simmons.
Put Reynolds in a great movie, you get a $150 million opening weekend. Put him in a bad one, and you get Green Lantern, a movie that Reynolds isn’t so proud of himself. He takes a couple of digs at it in Deadpool, and more explicitly, he was asked on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live how he would rate that radioactive swamp ass on a scale of 1 to 10.
“I would give it a scant, four, maybe. Three or four. It didn’t work,” he said before finally caving to the pressure. “A one. It’s a one!” As he admitted last week, Green Lantern simply “suffers from that typical Hollywood disease, which is that we get a poster, we get a release date, we got an actor, we don’t have a script, but we’re just gonna start shooting anyway.”
What about his first stab at playing Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Well, he wasn’t thrilled with that, either, as he discussed at a Google presentation:
“They sew his mouth shut, let lasers come out of his eyes. He has weird knives that fly out of his hands. I remember saying, ‘That’s really going to anger some people. That’s not Deadpool.’ And they basically said, ‘Well, you can play him or we can hire someone else to play him.’ So for me it was…I was a little bit blackmailed.”
Who else would they have hired, I wonder, because no other name has ever been attached to Deadpool, so far as I’ve ever seen. Reynolds has been associated with the property since David Goyer was attached to direct a Deadpool movie back in 2004, and the truth is, nobody could’ve pulled it off like Reynolds did. He was born to play the role, and now that he has a legit hit, Reynolds can start taking “movie star” roles instead of, say, The Change-Up.