3) Sometimes Leaks Are A Good Thing
Those who saw Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson in the X-Men movie saw a tease of what the character could be, but wasn’t yet. Nobody could imagine Reynolds as the classic Deadpool until they saw the test footage that was leaked in July of 2014, right before San Diego Comic-Con was ending.
Someone leaked a short bit of test footage that was shot with Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, suit, mouth and all. The footage was so fantastically violent and funny that it had to be real. So real in fact, that 20th Century Fox worked overtime to get the leaked footage taken down from YouTube.
In the three minute clip, which you can check out above, we see Reynolds in the suit, talking with a foul mouth and dispatching villains in a gory and nasty way while also breaking the fourth wall. It showed us he could pull off the Deadpool that we all knew and loved from the comic books and was instrumental in the studio moving forward on a film project that had been stalled for a very long time.
It’s also interesting to note that in an interview with Yahoo Movies, Reynolds even admitted that he considered leaking the test footage online himself at one point, saying:
“I was excited, because you can look back at an email chain from all of us, the core group involved in Deadpool, saying ‘We should leak this, f—-,’ like three years ago. Saying, ‘Hey, if this thing is going to stagnate, one of us should just say ‘Whoops, I slipped it online by accident.’ And nobody seemed to want to nut up and do that, myself included. Someone did it for us, years later, when we all completely assumed it was dead in the water.”
