Deadpool might need to watch his back. IT, the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s horror epic, just broke one of the R-rated box office champ’s records — and is primed to break a couple more before the end of the weekend. It’s doubtful that Pennywise will come close to overtaking the Merc With a Mouth’s massive box office haul, but it’s quite a win for the new horror film from Andy Muschietti, which already has a sequel in the works for 2019.
When is a superhero movie like Game of Thrones? When it’s the most pirated movie of the year, of course. On a new list of all the movies downloaded from popular torrenting site BitTorrent, the merc with a mouth tops the chart over Batman v. Superman, Captain America: Civil War, and The Force Awakens.
20th Century Fox sat on Deadpool for six years before finally giving it a green light with a modest $58 million budget. After a lengthy and impressive marketing campaign that ensured everyone in the world knew the name Wade Wilson, box office tracking was looking strong with $55 million. And then the film actually opened, more than doubling that prediction, shattering a handful of records and blowing the doors off the comic book movie genre. This feels like a big deal. Oh, and Zoolander 2 also opened.
Ryan Reynolds dropped by Conan tonight to debut the red band trailer for Deadpool — because if you’re going to give Deadpool a proper introduction, you’re going to do so with a respectable amount of violence and profanity. After months of promising an R-rated, faithful adaptation of beloved comic book character, Reynolds seems to be delivering.
We normally like to steer clear of the “trailer for a trailer” phenomena that results in photos of a 6-second Instagram video of a 15-second YouTube video teaser of an actual trailer. It’s a toxic fad in the world of movie promotion and one we hope goes away quickly, but we couldn’t resist sharing this trailer for a trailer for Deadpool. For one, it’s almost a minute long, and for another, it’s just funny.
Just the other day, Ryan Reynolds revealed that he’s been fighting with Fox over the rating for Deadpool, which he (and many other fans) firmly believes should be rated R. That’s been the big Deadpool question this week, and now it appears we have an unequivocal answer thanks to the magic of the April Fools’ holiday and one very special interview with Reynolds himself.
It’s fitting that Deadpool’s main super-power is his accelerated healing factor; you just can’t kill this guy. For years, they talked about making a Deadpool movie featuring Ryan Reynolds (who played a largely unrecognizable version of the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine). For years, Deadpool languished in development; long enough to kill most projects. But that damn healing factor kept Deadpool alive.
Ryan Reynolds has been trying to get a proper ‘Deadpool’ movie off the ground ever since he helped botch the character in the deplorable ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine.’ Yeah, he says he has a genuine affinity for the character, but he also has to appease the ever-fickle movie gods, who punished him for his earlier comic book movie transgressions by putting him in ‘Green Lantern.’ Making a ‘Deadpool’ movie is how he restores order to the universe. Anyway, Reynolds took to Twitter to share our first glimpse of the Merc With a Mouth’s costume and even in this early state, it’s a significant improvement over the previous big screen version of the character.
The death of Deadpool has been a long time coming. He's a popular character, and nothing says "popular" like a specially renumbered epic death event. Also, Marvel's sales head David Gabriel already told ComicBook.com months ago that Marvel was planning to kill off the character (or "a character with the word Dead in his name", but we didn't think it was going to be Dead Girl again), so the writing was on the wall for ol' Wade Wilson.
Now Marvel has confirmed to Nerdist that Deadpool will meet his end in Deadpool #250 (actually Deadpool #45) in April, in an issue that places the mercenary with a mouthcenary in a final confrontation with the jaunty beret-wearing goons of Ultimatum. The issue will be the last in the current series.