passion projects

How Much Does Ryan Reynolds Love Deadpool? So Much That He Personally Paid to Have the Screenwriters on Set

Photo: 20th Century Fox

While Deadpool was most noisily a big, honkin’ superhero movie, its true legacy might lie in star Ryan Reynolds’s hefty devotion to his passion project. From development to promotion to promotion to promotion, Reynolds nourished his baby to the nines. And now, Deadpool screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese have revealed new lore exposing the depths of Reynolds’s love. While we already knew that Reynolds personally paid a full $10,000 for the rights to include Bea Arthur’s likeness in the film, Wernick and Reese, appearing on AMC’s Geeking Out, shared that Reynolds also personally paid for them, too. While one might think that a superhero movie in 2016 has chump change to spare, 20th Century Fox was apparently much, much, much less-confident than Reynolds in Deadpool’s potential profitability, and so they kept the purse strings tied tight. As such, Wernick and Reese explained, when the studio wouldn’t pay to have the duo around once filming commenced, Reynolds ponied up. The screenwriters explained: “We were on set every day … Interestingly, Ryan wanted us there, we were on the project for six years. It was really a core creative team of us, Ryan, and the director Tim Miller. Fox interestingly wouldn’t pay for us to be on set. Ryan Reynolds paid out of his own money, out of his own pocket.” Ryan Reynolds: a singular man with a singular vision, and that vision was Deadpool.

Ryan Reynolds Personally Paid Deadpool Writers