Punching up lines in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ while creating a commercial with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? No problem for THR’s Producer of the Year, who made his antihero sequel the most successful R-rated film in history.
In 2011, the first Deadpool was in the early stages of development at 20th Century Fox when DC’s Green Lantern bombed, putting star Ryan Reynolds at risk of landing in actor jail. When another flop ensued, Universal’s R.I.P.D., the Canada-born actor known for hit rom-coms and as People‘s Sexiest Man Alive took his fate into his own hands by claiming full ownership of Deadpool, Hollywood’s first R-rated superhero pic. Some top Fox executives balked at moving ahead — one exception was then-production president Emma Watts — but that all changed when eight minutes of footage shot by director Tim Miller and Reynolds was leaked online. Millions of fanboys went nuts over Reynolds’ outrageously profane Merc With a Mouth.
Almost overnight, the light at Fox went from red to green, but Deadpool‘s producers, with Reynolds at the helm, were still only awarded a $72 million budget, slashed at the eleventh hour to $68 million — a fraction of the $200 million often spent on comic book movies. It didn’t matter. Released in 2016, following an outside-the-box marketing campaign — one billboard featured a skull, a poop emoji and the letter L (Dead-poo-L, get it?) — the movie was a critical and smash hit, becoming the top-grossing R-rated film of all time, with more than $782 million in worldwide ticket sales. “It was pretty clear from the beginning that Ryan is Deadpool and Deadpool is Ryan,” says Watts. “We knew the real challenge wasn’t Ryan — it was the R rating, which we were reminded of constantly.”
Nearly a decade later, the producer-writer-actor, marketing whiz and entrepreneur is at the pinnacle of a multifaceted career. He’s sold several businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars (Aviation Gin, Mint Mobile), helms the production and marketing company Maximum Effort with George Dewey, and bought a Welsh soccer team with Rob McElhenney that birthed hit docuseries Welcome to Wrexham. This year, Deadpool & Wolverine — the franchise is now housed at Marvel Studios following the Disney-Fox merger — earned a franchise-best $1.3 billion globally; it is the No. 2 highest-grossing film of 2024. Co-star Hugh Jackman — whom Reynolds calls his “emotional support movie star” — was the one to introduce his longtime best bud to director and producer Shawn Levy, resulting in a collaboration that led to Free Guy, The Adam Project and the third Deadpool installment.
“I’ve never worked with a producer who is in the shit and making it better every day and in every way throughout the process quite like Ryan,” says Levy. Jackman adds that many assume Reynolds improvises on the spot: “Actually, his superpower is that he’s written five different versions of every scene and he’s writing right up until the minute you’re shooting.” He also advises there’s no point in giving Reynolds a fancy trailer. “He’s never getting in it. He’s going to turn up on set and not going to leave the set because he wants to be in the middle of it,” Jackman continues. Veteran assistant director Josh McLaglen, a Levy compatriot whose credits include James Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic, sums up Reynolds’ 24/7 work ethic: “If you text, he’ll text you right back.”
After the Disney-Fox merger, Reynolds suddenly had new bosses to answer to. Disney CEO Bob Iger went out of his way to declare that Deadpool would keep its R rating, a first for the 100-year-old, family-friendly studio. Reynolds says he was “very nervous” the first few times he met Marvel chief Kevin Feige, who shares a PGA credit on Deadpool & Wolverine alongside Reynolds and Levy. Says Feige: “He’s an 800-pound gorilla and we are an 800-pound gorilla. I think we were circling each other for a while. But the truth is, we both love the same things: Shawn, Ryan and Hugh’s most successful movie happened when they stepped in to work with us at Marvel Studios.”
Reynolds — THR‘s Producer of the Year — recently conducted several conversations from his homey Tribeca office, not far from the New York City loft he shares with Blake Lively and their four small children when they’re not residing in upstate Pound Ridge. (The only topic Reynolds wouldn’t address when asked was the brouhaha over his wife’s hit 2024 film, It Ends With Us.) He reveals why he’s taking a break from filming , how Boy Band could be his next film and why Deadpool may never be the focus of a solo film again.
