(Alternative title: Why Deadpool and His Red Suited Booty Deserve Everything)
It’s safe to say that Deadpool is one of the highest anticipated movies of 2016, and with damn good cause.
The Deadpool movie has been in the works for over 11 years now – work on the movie began in 2004. 2004. That is an insane amount of time for a movie to remain in development hell, especially a movie that was so wanted and begged for by the fandom.
There were multiple issues with Deadpool and the studios that were interested – could we make it an R-Rating? How do we not repeat the same mistakes? How do we introduce all these elements from the Deadpool comics, namely his fourth-wall breaking? Over and over again, Deadpool seemed to hit a brick wall. IMDB would tease dates, at one point reading 2014 before resorting back to those Godawful “????” they put in the place when nothing is decided. It honestly looked like fans were never going to get this damn movie, and they seemed to accept it bitterly.
Until that faithful day in July 2014. When some sweet, beautiful, adonis of a human being leaked the Deadpool test footage online. You know the one I mean.
That’s right. And try as they might to get it off the internet (and oh, they did try.) no one seemed to be able to stop it – this awesome two minute long piece of everything fans have been begging for. So Blur Studio did what anyone would do in that situation – they said “fuckit.” and released this footage officially.
And thus, from there, the high demand, the excitement and the now renewed desire of the fans became too much to ignore, and little more than a month later it was announced that Deadpool was officially in production.
And now here we are. It’s February 2016. And Deadpool has broken a tonne of Box Office Records in North America, including 20th Century Fox opening weekend (Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith held it before then, let’s just all think about that.), R-Rated Opening Weekend, and R-Rated Opening Weekend (last held by The Matrix: Reloaded). And let me tell you: it goddamn deserves it.
It’s not just the sheer amount of time it took to even get this movie made (11 years. Most pets don’t live that long. I was twelve for Christ’s sake.) but the marketing strategies were pretty damn great.
You already knew from the go that Deadpool was not going to be like other superhero movies – it was going to be a lot cruder. From the moment they revealed the costume in a photoshoot which involved Ryan Reynolds lying on a bearskin rug to the 12 Days of Deadpool, to awesome PSA’s like this;
I can safely say Deadpool had a solid, clear marketing strategy from day one. It was so perfectly executed, and because of that, and because of the sheer perfection of the film itself – it deserves every record it broke upon release.
And hey, if you want to know exactly how awesome the film is, my lovely friend wrote a pretty sick review here.
Fare thee well,
Fran
(All images were taken from the official Deadpool Facebook Page!)