Ryan Reynolds, the Canadian actor who played Deadpool travelled to Edmonton, Alberta to hang out with Connor McGrath and gave him a special screening of the movie.
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Deadpool, the R-rated film adaption of the Marvel comic book that star Ryan Reynolds had to spend years convincing 20th Century Fox was worth making, broke a long list of records on its way to an estimated $135 million opening.
“Deadpool” more than doubled last week’s forecasts that ranged between $60 million and $70 million for the Friday-Monday period.
Overseas, Deadpool is doing huge business too, opening to $132.1 million from 61 markets over the 3-day weekend for a global debut of $282.1-M.
It’s a far cry from Reynolds’ last attempt at headlining a superhero movie: Green Lantern was critically mauled and opened with $3 million in August 2011.
It’s all shocking considering the restrictive R-rating and that the surging movie was looking to make a top-end projection of $US90 million going into what looked to be an already wildly-successful weekend, according to Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst for ComScore tracking service. Note that the estimated production budget for “Deadpool” is less than a lot of those other films at million. “Deadpool” also stands as the biggest opening for any R-rated movie, surpassing the $91.8 million launch of “The Matrix Reloaded” in 2003. The movie not only had a strong start among fanboys, but kept performing well all weekend. Amazingly (well not for the movie), that wasn’t the biggest drop seen on the charts on this week, as the Marlon Wayans spoof Fifty Shades of Black dropped eight places from 13th to 21st. Deadpool has now earned an 84% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Third place went to romantic comedy How to Be Single, released by New Line and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which took in about $18.8 million.
Even if the drop-off is massive after the opening weekend, they’ve almost tripled their budget (including promotion). Deadpool succeeded because the movie and the brilliant marketing campaign were true to the character, and my guess is that any attempt to shoehorn other comic-book heroes into that template to “be more like Deadpool” will be greeted with skepticism by the public.
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“Zoolander 2”, released by Paramount Pictures 15 years after the first film, debuted in fourth place. Rounding out the top five was “The Revenant” with $6.9 million.
