The ‘Deadpool’ Movie Will Be Beautifully Insane

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Published on
April 2, 2015

When it was first announced that Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool movie would finally be getting made following a test footage “leak,” fans everywhere rejoiced. Finally there would be redemption for the mouthless zombie Deadpool that somehow was allowed to appear in X-Men Origins. We have ourselves a release date of February 2016, a director in visual effects whiz Tim Miller, and a leading man in Reynolds. All the pieces are in place for a comic book movie that we’re venturing to guess will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Behind a stellar two minutes of test footage and a passionate creative team, already we have a recipe for a great movie. But more than that, it’s a chance to redeem an entire dark chapter of the X-Men movie franchise. We’ve already seen X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: First Class toss Origins out the window as non-canon, but with the birth of a Deadpool movie, we’ll finally put the nail in a coffin that’s long overdue to be buried. But this of course leads to the next logical question of what exactly the planned film will be about.

A brief synopsis on the 20th Century Fox website gives us a wonderfully vague rundown of upcoming movie’s plot:

Deadpool tells the origin story of former Special Forces operative turned mercenary Wade Wilson, who after being subjected to a rogue experiment that leaves him with accelerated healing powers, adopts the alter ego Deadpool. Armed with his new abilities and a dark, twisted sense of humor, Deadpool hunts down the man who nearly destroyed his life.

On the surface it seems like a simple revenge flick, but if the comic mythos as well as Reynolds’s vision for the character are to be believed, it’ll be far more than that once we get the final product. Combine that with the recent casting for the pre-cognitive telepath Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and things are shaping up to be just the right amount of weird. Of course, having Reynolds in the iconic red suit post up Burt Reynolds style on a bear rug in front of a fireplace certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

The biggest indicator that this could end up being a “so crazy it’s good” sort of project, though? The insistence on getting it an R-rating. Typically, superhero franchise films sit comfortably at PG-13 to attract as wide an audience as humanly possible.

Try naming a Marvel or DC franchise flick with an explicit rating and odds are you’ll come up short. After rumors surfaced of a possible PG-13 rating for Deadpool, Reynolds took to Twitter to lay out everything on the table, promising that he “want[s] Deadpool to be R. Always have. Fighting the good fight still. Lotta yelling today.” An R-rating would represent a massive departure from the norm, giving the movie free rein creatively to really do justice to a comic that revels in its stylistic yet gruesome violence.

Reynolds’s Twitter saga fighting for the rating continued on past that just a couple of days later, suggesting that they make any blood in the movie green to please the “adorable, taint-punchers releasing films.” Two hours after that, he promised fans that even a PG-13 rating would include “4th-wall breaking, a shit-ton of action, and at least 3 chimichangas.” Reynolds later appeared on YouTube in an interview with Mario Lopez, where he revealed that the “controversy” over the PG-13 rating that he’d been setting up for days had in fact been an April Fools joke. Meaning? Deadpool will unequivocally, absolutely be rated R.

If the “fight” for a more explicit rating tells us one thing, it’s that Deadpool is aiming to be just as beautifully insane as its source material. The quick-talking “merc’ with a mouth” has spent the better part of his history defying the system he exists within, even breaking through the fourth wall to take on the writers of the very comic he resides in. It’s a bizarre saga of violence and meta-humor, and could very well be the breath of fresh air a world of tired superhero franchises needs right now.

Follow Nick on Twitter @NickNorthwest

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