Remember X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

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You’re forgiven if you don’t. The 2009 release did solid numbers at the box office but its 38 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and the better performances — both critically and financially — of Wolverine and X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past combined to make it something of an afterthought within the franchise.

Rack your brain a bit though, and you may recall that flick provided the on-screen introduction of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, now setting box office records on his own. And to hear Reynolds tell it, the studio may or may not have given him an ultimatum which felt pretty strange at the time but wound up paying off handsomely for all involved down the road. He discussed at a Talks at Google presentation last week:

“They sew his mouth shut, let lasers come out of his eyes. He has weird knives that fly out of his hands. I remember saying, ‘That’s really going to anger some people. That’s not Deadpool.’ And they basically said, ‘Well, you can play him or we can hire someone else to play him.’ So for me it was…I was a little bit blackmailed.”

Again, not cool then, very cool now. Reynolds went from being not much more than a glorified bit player back then to a major movie star now. What probably felt like a bad deal seven years ago wound up setting the stage for his entire career.

(via Comicbook.com)

Now Watch: How ‘Deadpool’ Went From A Studio-Rejected Test Scene To A Marketing Phenomenon