Ryan Reynolds had been trying to get Deadpool made for a decade before the 2016 film finally hit big screens. He explains the creative money management it took.
Deadpool & Wolverine is finally upon us in a matter of days. It is the only official MCU movie being released this year, and it happens to be a massive one. Reynolds, Jackman and their director, Shawn Levy, have been making the rounds doing promotion for the much-anticipated sequel. This sequel is already setting records for pre-sold tickets, so it’s quite amazing looking back to see how much of a hardship it was to get the first film made. 20th Century Fox would famously drag their feet on the project, especially since they already had Wade Wilson show up in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
According to Variety, Reynolds spoke to The New York Times when he revealed that he had actually paid out of his own pocket to have the screenwriters on set since the production on the first film was much more run-and-go. Reynolds explained, “No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success. I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen: They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.”
He continues, “It was a lesson in a couple of senses. I think one of the great enemies of creativity is too much time and money, and that movie had neither time nor money. It really fostered focusing on character over spectacle, which is a little harder to execute in a comic-book movie. I was just so invested in every micro-detail of it and I hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time. I remembered wanting to feel that more — not just on Deadpool, but on anything.”
The original 2016 film had been released in a market that was already flooded with a bevy of superhero comic book movies. The majority of the films would showcase grand sequences and flaunt around in their mega-budgets. Deadpool was very scaled back in comparison and Reynolds thinks it benefited from having to work around a smaller budget, “Necessity is the mother of invention. The more constraints you place on a creative process, the more you think outside of the box. So, personally, I didn’t want more money than we needed. We wanted just enough money to make what we set out to make, but also find ways to creatively pivot.”