Superhero movies are big business these days, so you would think when one is in the works, every film distributor would jump at the chance to get it to theaters. Apparently, that's not always the case.
The writer of the "Deadpool" adaptation hoping to make it to the big screen enlisted help from his Twitter followers to get the attention of film distributors. "Team Pool needs your official 'vote' of support. Let's break the internet. RETWEET if you would buy a ticket to the DEADPOOL MOVIE," wrote Rhett Reese in a tweet from Aug. 7.
At the time of this writing, more than 30,000 people have retweeted Reese's message, so clearly there is some demand for this film. Reese, who wrote "Monsters, Inc.," "Zombieland" and "G.I. Joe: Retaliation," previously tweeted a photo of Ryan Reynolds, who portrayed Deadpool a.k.a. Wade Wilson in 2009's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," testing for the film.
Actual test footage was also leaked prior to that with Reynolds in the title role. Though it was obviously unfinished, the footage looked more like a video game than a movie. However, the little snippet seemed to be very true to the character of Deadpool, who has a twisted sense of humor as the "Merc with a mouth." Deadpool is also a bit of a dark character, so even though he's always cracking jokes, the overall movie might be more in line with the tone of Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy than Marvel's superhero movies, which are generally pretty light-hearted.
Unfortunately, 20th Century Fox has tried to remove the video completely, even though it's still available on some corners of the Internet. Either the studio wants this film never to see the light of day or it wants to make us anticipate it even more. The world may never know. Reese's tweet makes one lean toward the former, but that probably doesn't mean "Deadpool" will be out for the count. With so much talk of superhero movies these days, it would be hard to believe a studio wouldn't want to pick this one up. If all else fails, Reese and the rest of the creative team could always fund the movie on a crowdsourcing site such as Kickstarter, which successfully funded major films like the "Veronica Mars" movie and Zach Braff's "Wish I Was Here." It feels like there's been talk of a "Deadpool" movie for years now, but if it turns out to be anything like the test footage, it will be well worth the wait.
