The Deadpool movie might never have gotten off the ground without help from a couple of guys you might not suspect. The first major superhero release of 2016 was a roaring success, setting the benchmark for nearly everything after it. Ryan Reynolds did fight to get it made, even using crowd funding since there was almost no backers, but he had help.
James Cameron and David Fincher were instrumental in getting the “merc with a mouth” on the big screen, Tim Miller recently admitted. The guy behind the blockbuster CG-packed film Avatar and some Hollywood favorites like Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day actually suggested that Fox should do something with the Ryan Reynolds reboot. Another guy whose credits include Fight Club , Gone Girl , and Se7en did the same. Apparently it took two heavy-hitters to help make probably the most loved superhero film under 20th Century Fox.
The Deadpool movie was a risk from the start, one which Ryan Reynolds himself wanted especially after Fox made that theatrical mess which was X-Men Origins: Wolverine .
Just heard that James Cameron helped make @deadpoolmovie a reality, so I’ll just leave this here #Deadpool pic.twitter.com/xnUx62kAVm
— Garrett Washburn (@gmoney_washburn) June 9, 2016
That fourth film in the franchise did a lot of things wrong, including re-filming what we’d already seen in flashbacks in X-Men 2 . Deadpool got the worst treatment of them all, having been turned into something not even the character’s fans recognized.
How David Fincher and James Cameron Helped Get Deadpool Made https://t.co/2OzThioXPI
— MrsTasker (@Mrs_Tasker) June 9, 2016
Ryan Reynolds and Tim Miller knew how disappointing that film was, and went out of their way to poke fun at it several times throughout the length of the character’s own movie. The fourth-wall breaks were such a big part of the 2016 film that audiences couldn’t get enough. Even the clever marketing as a romance film helped the movie, but probably not as much as a couple of Hollywood heavyweights putting a proverbial bug in the ear of 20th Century Fox executives.
Screenwriter Rhett Reese explained what James Cameron and David Fincher did to get the once-dormant Deadpool movie moving forward.
“They read the script each of them at two independent key moments during the script’s development. And each one of them was kind enough to go to 20th Century Fox and essentially throw in their good word just saying ‘Hey, what are you guys doing with Deadpool ? You should be making this!’ David was a help before Jim and he was just kind of nudging along the way. And then Jim ultimately weighed in in a key decision node moment and got Fox to free up some money to try a PG-13 draft at the time — that was not Jim’s idea, that was Fox’s idea.”
Eventually Ryan Reynolds and the fan base persuaded Fox to allow the Deadpool movie to be rated R . The comics are ultra-violent at times, and the rating even allowed Reynolds to use curse words instead of the stock “almost” curse words which litter the source material.
We didn’t know about this before, but it seems the men behind Aliens and Fight Club helped make the Deadpool movie a reality. Tim Miller said that their aid was never meant to be public knowledge .
“First of all they’re probably mad at me… because that was never intended to be public knowledge! Listen — the industry listens to [taste-makers] and you could not find two gentlemen who have better taste in what should become a movie or be made into a movie and so I just thought that maybe they could help push the boulder up the hill a little bit, which they kindly did.”
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[Image via 20th Century Fox]