This week's Empire Podcast featured Ryan Reynolds, who was very funny and very interesting in equal measure. In it, he talked about both the mooted Justice League **project, as well as the Deadpool script, and now the guys who wrote it -** Zombieland**'s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick - said a little more about it to Collider.
"We have a phenomenal director in Tim Miller, who did about a three minute test for Fox, and Ryan came in to do the mo-cap for it and the voice," Reese explained. "And it’s like the greatest three minutes ever. I look at the three minutes and I’m like, 'That’s the movie, and it has to get made.' I think the biggest hurdle right now is convincing the-powers-that-be that it’s okay to have a hard-R rated movie within the Marvel Universe."
Tim Miller is a visual effects expert who's worked on X-Men, X2 and, um, Babe: Pig In The City, which makes sense considering this is a piece of digital test footage rather than Deadpool in his suit, doing his thing in real life. It's safe to say this wouldn't be the case if the movie did come to pass...
Interestingly, Reese makes an interesting point about this being a problem in terms of a hard-R movie within the Marvel universe, which is something that, say, the likes of** Kick-Ass** don't have to deal with. Then again, Ryan did tell us it wouldn't fit in with the X-Men Origins: Wolverine storyline, so maybe that might help.
"I think there just has to be a tolerance for the outlier," Reese adds. "There has to be a tolerance for this one project that’s not like all the other Marvel projects." Wernick compares the situation to that of Iron Man's back in the day: "Tony Stark and the hard drinking, fast-talking billionaire was very different from all the other Marvel characters. And look what it became. And we feel that way about Deadpool."
The Iron Man comparison doesn't quite work however - Tony is never seen drinking all that hard, and he never shoots anyone in the head for defending the **Star Wars **prequels. That said, if this Deadpool feature film does come to pass, and in a hard-R form, we'll be first in line to see it, though with more and more meant-to-be-gritty-and-bloody movies like **A Good Day To Die Hard **getting a 12A certificate to appeal to younger cinemagoers, it's going to be a long shot...