Deadpool is not a typical superhero movie.
And that's because Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is not a superhero—he's an antihero. As such, 20th Century Fox's movie received an R rating for "strong violence and language throughout, sexual content and graphic nudity"—and that's putting it mildly. Reynolds stars as the titular character, a mercenary originally known as Wade Wilson. To cure his cancer, he was subjected to an experimental regenerative mutation. The treatment promised to give him accelerated healing abilities, but it came with side effects, like full body scarring and bouts of insanity.
Reynolds first played the part in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine opposite Hugh Jackman, and for years, he worked tirelessly to get a Deadpool spinoff made. Test footage created for the proposed film leaked in July 2014, and two months later, the movie was green-lit and given a scheduled released date of Feb. 12, 2016.
In addition to Reynolds, Deadpool also stars Morena Baccarin as Vanessa Carlysle, Gina Carano as Angel Dust, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Stefan Kapičić as Piotr Rasputin/Colossus, T.J. Miller as Weasel, Jed Rees as The Recruiter, Ed Skrein as Francis/Ajax and Leslie Uggams as Blind Al.
In GQ's September 2015 issue, Reynolds explained Deadpool's unusual virtue. "He's funny and acerbic and a little bit of a head case. But he's also not trying to be liked," he told the magazine. "He's intentionally trying to annoy everyone." After taking so long to get the movie made, he made sure to mark the cast and crew's first day on set. "We just started rolling, and I was like, 'No, no, hold on.' We went in the other room and we huddled up: 'We're making this movie! We've been trying to get this movie made for six f--king years, and here we are. We're doing it right now. Just remember this second. Just take a moment to be thankful for that.' And then we all went out and just started shooting and dicking around and had some fun."
After the failure of 2011's The Green Lantern, Reynolds said he was "a little bit" nervous to play another comic book character. "But Deadpool was different because there wasn't a big budget attached to it. There was not a tremendous responsibility to meet some kind of bottom line. Those kinds of superhero movies when you're out front, there's a vast and quite frightening budget attached to them. This one had a super-reasonable budget, and it was subversive and a little bit different, and to me a little refreshing in the comic-book world," he told GQ. "But you always have trepidation. When you're out front, you have trepidation."