Ryan Reynolds is well known for playing a major role when it comes to shaping the creative direction of his star vehicles, and the actor’s fingerprints are all over the two Deadpool movies, which isn’t surprising when he was the leading man and co-producer who took an official writing credit on the second installment.
The 43 year-old clearly tailors his projects to suit his self-aware and irreverent screen persona, and it appears that upcoming action comedy Free Guy will be no different. The high concept blockbuster looks to be playing directly to his strengths, and director Shawn Levy revealed that a lot of it had to do with Reynolds adding his own personal flourishes to the script, which was originally written by Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn.
Mariah Carey’s pop classic “Fantasy” has been all over the Free Guy marketing campaign, and in a recent interview, Levy admitted that the decision was entirely down to Reynolds, who really loves the song and found it giving him inspiration while he tackled the rewrites.
“Credit where credit’s due. Ryan, when he was doing the earliest dialogue polishes on this screenplay, he was listening to Mariah in his home, and he wrote “Fantasy” into the script. And I go, ‘What’s this about?’, and he’s like, ‘It just feels good’. So literally, based on nothing but Ryan’s instinct, and the fact that was one of his writing tracks in the revisions of Free Guy, we approached Team Mariah and it led to that song being the signature track. Not only in the movie, but in the campaign for the movie.”
The production team will have no doubt had to shell out a pretty penny to secure the rights to the track, and if Free Guy manages to overcome the continued uncertainty surrounding the theatrical industry and do big business at the box office, then Carey stands to pocket a tidy sum from the heavy use of her 1995 single.
So far, at least, the movie looks like the sort of acton-packed and hilarious blockbuster that audiences have been desperately starved of throughout 2020, and hopefully Free Guy goes some way to rejuvenating the box office when one of the last few remaining major releases of the year arrives as scheduled on December 11th.
