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Ryan Reynolds was looking forward to a potential Deadpool spin-off when the idea became a real possibility. What might have been just as exciting for Reynolds was the thought of a filmmaker like Quentin Tarantino directing the movie.
Quentin Tarantino was offered to direct ‘Green Lantern’
There were a couple of superhero projects that Tarantino had almost gotten his hands on. Although he much prefers to direct his own material, for a while Tarantino was interested in developing a Luke Cage movie. Ironically, he could’ve also done a Green Lantern project, which ended up starring Ryan Reynolds in 2011.
“I was offered the Green Lantern,” Tarantino said in a 2009 interview with MTV News. “Not since it’s been a script, but just like, ‘Hey we own the Green Lantern. Would you like it?”
Tarantino shared that it might have been the wrong time in his life to be offered a superhero film to helm. If the director was offered one decades earlier, he might have jumped at the opportunity to adapt a comic book franchise.
“So there’s a little part of me that’s like, ‘Wow, if I was in my 20s, this would be the genre I’d want to specialize in,’” Tarantino said. “But they weren’t making them then, or at least not the right ones. But there also is an aspect where I’ve kind of outgrown that a little bit.”
If he ever did do a superhero movie, Tarantino confided it would be about his own original hero.
“I’d want to use my imagination and not have to fight with geeks’ memories of how this character should be and, ‘Oh, I cast an actor as opposed to a bodybuilder’ or it’s not as good as the way [DC Comics artist] Neal Adams drew him.’ If I were to do something like that, I would want the fun of coming up with the superhero myself,” Tarantino said.
Ryan Reynolds wanted Quentin Tarantino for ‘Deadpool’
Deadpool might have been a nice fit for Tarantino’s style of filmmaking. The comic book character was known for his fourth-wall breaking and off-the-wall humor. Reynolds wasn’t a comic fan growing up, but he was immediately drawn to the character of Deadpool after researching him.
“I read the Deadpool comics and, sure enough, I really connected to the world, and I felt like he occupied a space in the comic book world that no other character could or would, at least that I’d heard of at the time,” Reynolds once told the Los Angeles Times. “I knew that very few comic books broke the fourth wall and included the audience in the way that Deadpool did. So I knew he was working off a different footprint than some of the other guys.”
Before the Deadpool film was official, Reynolds was already thinking about potential directors to collaborate with. Although he knew it was a long shot, he would’ve liked to include Tarantino in the feature.
“You think directors for a movie like this and you immediately picture [Quentin Tarantino] or somebody like that,” Reynolds told MTV News back in 2009. “Obviously Tarantino is a guy that likes to direct his own material, so there’s a good chance he wouldn’t be the guy. We all have our lists of dream directors.”
Quentin Tarantino sees superhero directors as ‘hired hands’
Another reason why fans might not see Tarantino direct a superhero feature is because of the restrictions they typically place on filmmakers. Directors of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for instance, rarely veered too much away from Marvel’s successful formula. Doing so has sometimes resulted in directors leaving the MCU entirely, like Edgar Wright and Patty Jenkins.
It was a way of filmmaking that might not have appealed to Tarantino.
“You have to be a hired hand to do those things,” Tarantino said in a fairly recent interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I’m not a hired hand. I’m not looking for a job.”
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