Green Lantern was a flop and the X-Men spin-off Deadpool looked dead in the water – that is until fans saw test footage of the actor as the wisecracking crimefighter, and decided that the red mask fits

There was a moment around four years ago when it looked like Ryan Reynolds might emerge from rom-com purgatory and find a place for himself as a wisecracking superhero, alongside the likes of Robert Downey Jr. Reynolds had won acclaim for the unorthodox 2010 indie thriller Buried, in which he was mesmerising as a civilian truck driver who is kidnapped and buried alive by Iraqi insurgents with only a torch and a mobile phone for company. Coupled with a positively received cameo as the superhero Deadpool in the otherwise disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the Canadian actor was boasting some serious buzz.

Then along came Green Lantern, a supremely ill-conceived 2011 superhero epic about the space-roaming DC comics crimefighter. Reynolds wasn’t terrible in it by any means, but the film suffered from hamfisted characterisation, lazy screenwriting and shonky CGI. With its star suddenly far from flavour of the month, 20th Century Fox’s proposed Deadpool X-Men spin-off entered studio purgatory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The leaked Deadpool test footage

Now the movie seems to be back on, after leaked test footage of Reynolds as the masked antihero caused a huge stir online earlier this year. Variety reported yesterday that a deal is being closed for the movie to enter production, while the film’s star posted an image of Deadpool’s distinctive mask, depicted in a collage of spent bullets and cartridge cases. The caption? “Uh ... It’s Chimichanga Time”, a reference to the character’s penchant for deep-fried burritos.

Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) Uh... It's Chimichanga Time. pic.twitter.com/ZlknW4HOtj

Might Deadpool mark a turn in Reynolds’s fortunes? That will depend on whether Fox holds its nerve and delivers a film that lives up to the edgy verve of the test footage, which drew exactly the kind of fanboy gasps you might expect from a superhero movie featuring foul language, extreme violence and a protagonist with obvious mental-health issues. Like Kick-Ass in 2010, Deadpool looks like a fresh take on the formula, as opposed to the Tony Stark-lite in space template used byGreen Lantern. The fact that it’s impossible to recognise Reynolds’s boyish features in the footage, coupled with the freaky lack of a mouth hole in Deadpool’s mask, makes the vision all the more irresistible.

This also ought to be a movie that sidesteps many of the usual credibility issues that superhero movies have. Green Lantern, with its cosmic-space-alien-police-force premise, was always going to be a hard sell; but unlike, say, Batman, Deadpool’s penchant for throwing himself into situations promising almost certain death seems believable. Firstly, he boasts the superhero ability to regenerate after almost any injury, and secondly, he really is completely crazy.

The fear, of course, is that Fox will realise that this unorthodox confection really is at best a $100m movie, with a loyal hardcore fanbase but little potential for big-figure box-office returns and zero chance of getting a release in fiercely censorial China. Then begins the slow process of retooling the character and movie for a PG-13 US audience, a process that the little known first-time director Tim Miller would be powerless to resist.

But for now, let’s assume that the Deadpool who arrives in February 2016 is the one we’ve already seen furiously freewheeling across the screen like a nutty whirling dervish. It might just be the start of a Rey-naissance – and you can’t even really see the guy acting.