The movie Ryan Reynolds wishes he never made
So far, the beloved Canadian actor and Wrexham AFC co-owner Ryan Reynolds has led an impressively varied career with a winning personality to boot. He rose to prominence with breakthrough film roles in comedies like 2005’s Waiting… and 2009’s The Proposal but avoided a typecast situation with more serious roles in movies like Buried, Woman in Gold and Life.
With his naturally affable and comic presence, Reynolds appears most at home in comedies and found his forte portraying the unconventional superhero Deadpool in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Reynolds debuted as Deadpool in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine alongside leading star Hugh Jackman but enjoyed widespread appreciation under the spotlight in 2016’s Deadpool and its 2018 sequel.
The Deadpool series has become Reynolds’ biggest cash cow over the past decade and looks to remain so, with Deadpool 3 slated for release in 2024. Despite Deadpool’s success, Reynolds’ foray into the superhero sphere wasn’t without its hiccups. In 2011, having debuted as Deadpool for Marvel two years prior, Reynolds tried his hand at leading the DC Comics movie Green Lantern.
Green Lantern enjoyed success at the box office in its debut week, thanks to the long-built reputation of DC Comics, but took a nosedive of 66 per cent in its second week. Overall, Green Lantern was deemed a commercial failure relative to other movies in its category and was broadly panned by critics.
Among the movie’s fiercest critics is Reynolds himself. In a mid-credits scene following Deadpool 2, the titular character travels back in time to find Reynolds himself first reading the Green Lantern script. After shooting Reynolds in the head, he says: “You’re welcome, Canada.”
The risible scene makes light of Green Lantern’s poor reception and suggests Reynold’s regret over the role. In a 2016 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Reynolds explained why Green Lantern was a flop, and Deadpool prospered.
“Well, it’s simple: Deadpool always knew what it was,” Reynolds said. “With Green Lantern, I don’t think anyone ever figured out exactly what it was… It also fell victim to the process in Hollywood, which is like poster first, release date second, script last. At the time, it was a huge opportunity for me, so I was excited to try and take part in it.”
Speaking of watching the movie he branded a “disaster” for years in 2023, Reynolds said: “There was just too many people spending too much money and when there was a problem rather than say, ‘OK, let’s stop spending on special effects and let’s think about character’. That just never… the thinking was never there to do that,” he said, adding. “And to their credit, it’s a very old school way of looking at things. It’s just ‘Let’s just keep spending our way through this.’ And that was… it didn’t work.
Upon seeing the movie, he said: “The words were ‘holy s***’ and ‘no, no!’ It was crazy. It was an odd feeling. It was not a feeling I wanted to repeat. So I really spent the following years just owning as much as I could, it was the only way to kind of process it.”
Watch the mid-credits spoof scene from Deadpool 2 below.