Few actors have displayed as much commitment to a character as Ryan Reynolds has for Deadpool. He lobbied for the part in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, only for the film to catastrophically miss the point by removing the mouth from, er, the Merc with a Mouth. After that critical flop, it seemed like the fan favorite might be dead in the water, but then Reynolds teamed up with Tim Miller to finance some test footage to show the studio what a solo movie for the character could be like – which was subsequently leaked to salivating fans. From there, the rest is history.
Deadpool was greenlit and on its release exceeded all box office projections to become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. And now, in just two months, we’ll get to see Deadpool 2. Reynolds has smartly brought along the first film’s writers, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to pen the script, but we’ve today learned (via the 20th Century Fox website) that the actor himself has earned a writing credit on the pic as well.
Even better, due to the particulars of Writers Guild of America rules, we can work out that he helped write the script along with Reese and Wernick rather than simply contribute ad-libs or on-set rewrites (you can tell because their names are separated by “&”s rather than “and”s). It’s safe to say that Reynolds knows Deadpool inside and out, and the more contributions he’s had to the overall direction of the film the better in my opinion.
Despite having had a rather rocky week, with audiences reportedly not reacting well to a test screening, Deadpool 2 ended things on a high with yesterday’s seriously awesome trailer. While it might not be my most anticipated superhero movie of the year (no prizes for guessing what other Josh Brolin-starring film that might be), it definitely looks set to follow in the excellent footsteps of the original smash hit and you can bet I’ll be there opening night on May 18th.