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Ryan Reynolds has shared he originally wanted to film Deadpool & Wolverine under the disguise of a terrible fake movie.
The third installment of the Deadpool franchise, which released on Friday, July 26, sees the return of Reynolds, 47, as the loudmouth antihero alongside Hugh Jackman’s bearded mutant.
Both Reynolds and Jackman, 55, made a recent appearance on the popular YouTube series Hot Ones, where they spoke about harmful movie leaks.
“I’m shocked that we managed to get through this without some of our biggest surprises ending up – even being hypothesized – online. But, man, it’s hard to keep a secret,” Reynolds said.
“The original idea with this movie was to shoot a fake movie called Alpha Cop, that was intentionally bad,” he explained. “I even had one of the posters made. It was about two guys who were sharing one brain and together they make the ultimate cop.”
Reynolds revealed the tagline for the movie was: “Two cops, one brain, all balls,” with the idea being that he and Jackman would lead the fake movie, Alpha Cop, while they shot Deadpool & Wolverine in secret. Yet, then, while promoting the former, audiences would get the surprise of a lifetime when it was unveiled that the movie was actually Deadpool & Wolverine.
“It was meant to be kind of, like, horrible,” the Free Guy star said of the fake movie. “Like 10 people in America would go to see this movie on opening weekend and five minutes into the movie the Marvel logo would flip up and it would actually be Deadpool & Wolverine.”
He said that the problem would have been “that if you managed to get down to the last minute and it got blown, it would just be heartbreaking.”
“It would be really unfortunate for the people who really wanted to see Alpha Cop, too, you know,” host Sean Evans joked.
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Jackman chimed in to give an example of a bad leak, recalling the notorious moment 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked online a week before it was scheduled to premiere.
“In fact, I think it’s the only case where someone has been prosecuted and gone to jail for a leak,” the Australian actor said. “It was a rough, rough [cut] and it was leaked maybe a week before we came out, and I think I remember someone saying, ‘I think it’s up to 10 million people have seen it already before we came out.’”
In 2011, Gilberto Sanchez was convicted of piracy and sentenced to one year in federal prison after he admitted to illegally uploading a nearly final “workprint” copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to the internet.
Directed by Shawn Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine has received mixed reviews from critics.
While The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey found it to be a “tedious and annoying corporate merger of a film,” in her two-star review, Variety called the bromance an “irreverent send-off to Fox’s X-Men movies.”
Deadpool & Wolverine is out in theaters now.
