“Ryan is the keeper of the Deadpool flame. It’s extraordinary how much he fully invests in Deadpool.”
That’s Simon Kinberg there, Deadpool 2 producer and the creative mind powering next year’s Dark Phoenix, speaking to Entertainment Weekly about the level of commitment that Ryan Reynolds shows day in, day out.
Not unlike Hugh Jackman’s unwavering loyalty to Wolverine – and even Channing Tatum’s own affinity of Gambit, providing the Remy LeBeau origin movie can take flight – Reynolds has become synonymous with the foul-mouthed, fourth-wall-breaking Merc With a Mouth. So much so, in fact, that once the bullets start flying and the bodies start dropping, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where Ryan Reynolds ends and Deadpool begins.
All of this has boosted the Merc’s popularity to unprecedented heights – and not a moment too soon, as Deadpool 2 is almost upon us. It’s the current cover star of Entertainment Weekly, too, and when the outlet caught up with Ryan Reynolds, the Canadian described the anti-hero sequel in his own peculiar way:
The first movie is a love story masquerading as a comic book movie, and this one is kind of a family film masquerading as a comic book film again.
He continued:
It was like a soft system update. You know, when it’s like your phone gives you an update, but it’s only like [the] font or something. It’s not going to give you some awesome thing. It was kind of that. My shin guards are shinier. I mean f—, who cares. Nothing that allowed me to find my penis within 20 minutes when I had to pee. No, nothing like that. God forbid we should just put a normal f—ing zipper in it.
On the other side of the lens, Atomic Blonde and John Wick‘s David Leitch has stepped into the director’s chair once occupied by Tim Miller (The Terminator), and here, Leitch outlines some of the pressures he faced upon climbing aboard:
Going in and making a sequel is intimidating. I never planned on doing a sequel. But to have the opportunity to do Deadpool is different in that the world is so fun and irreverent you can kinda go anywhere.
Look for Deadpool 2 to blast its way into theaters on May 18th, by which point Avengers: Infinity War‘s vice-like grip on the global box office should be starting to wane…
