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Points for self-awareness: Not even Ryan Reynolds, in the midst of pitching a Star Wars movie to his pals at Disney, necessarily thought Ryan Reynolds would be a good fit for the Star Wars universe.
This is per a conversation Reynolds recently had on Scott Mendelson’s The Box Office podcast, where he revealed that, in the wake of making Disney huge amounts of money with last year’s R-rated MCU flick Deadpool And Wolverine, he’d pitched the entertainment giant on a similarly “adult” film set in its other big cinematic universe. “I pitched to Disney,” Reynolds revealed. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do an R-rated “Star Wars” property? It doesn’t have to be overt, A+ characters. There’s a wide range of characters you could use.’ And I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”
Which, as people who kind of lost their minds over the recently concluded Andor—which fits what Reynolds is saying, albeit in TV, about as well as any Star Wars project ever has—we say that all sounds pretty good. (If also unlikely: The fact that the very “take the only thing that’s worked lately and run with it” The Mandalorian And Grogu is the first movie the franchise has gotten made in several years suggests that Disney is not feeling particularly experimental when it comes to Star Wars films in the wake of Rise Of Skywalker.)
But not even Reynolds thought he should star in such a film. “That would be a bad fit,” he noted, probably accurately. (Reynolds can be genuinely emotionally affecting in things, including the Deadpool movies, but his default stance is a kind of irony that’s really hard to imagine matching the—admittedly flexible—Star Wars tone.). “I’d want to produce and write or be a part of behind the scenes,” he clarified. “Those kinds of IP subsist really well on scarcity and surprise. We don’t get scarcity really with Star Wars because of Disney+, but you can certainly still surprise people.”
Also, all of this has to be taken in the context of Reynolds’ collaborator on Deadpool And Wolverine, director Shawn Levy, successfully pitching Disney on his own Star Wars movie, Starfighter. (Starring Ryan Gosling, as Levy executes a technically difficult Hollywood Ryan Swap.) Details about Starfighter are basically nil, but we’re guessing it won’t be rated R when it eventually arrives.
[via Variety]
