Deadpool director Tim Miller denies that he was responsible for the leaking of the famous test footage that led Fox to give the film the green light.
Deadpool director Tim Miller denies leaking the test footage used to make the film. The famous R-rated superhero Deadpool is now a film institution that is even on the cusp of joining the MCU. So it’s easy to forget that at one point no one even believed that a Deadpool movie could be made.
Dark superhero movies were, of course, a big thing in the 1990s and early 2000s thanks to titles like Sheet and hellboy. But as studios shifted to making more family-friendly comic book movies, it looked like the super-violent and super-professional Deadpool would be left out in the cold. Most fans thought they would get together one day Deadpool movie was the very unsatisfactory appearance of the character in the years 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
But then a series of events happened that changed Deadpool’s fate forever. All-CGI test footage leaked out of nowhere showing filmmaker Miller’s plans for a… Deadpool movie. To this day, it is widely believed that the public’s reaction to these leaked images prompted Fox to eventually make Deadpool. It has also never been revealed who was responsible for the leaking of the footage Deadpool to happen. Miller, for his part, continues to deny being the culprit, recently told the YouTube channel Gang crew he wasn’t. Check out Miller’s comments on the leak and how it contributed to the making of the film in the space below:
We took this test, budgeted, made a plan, and Fox said, “We don’t believe in the movie.” And then the test leaked. But it was a beautiful thing that happened for all the right reasons. But I wasn’t. It was one of those things that I think should be kept secret because a mystery is more interesting than the truth. … Well, a whole series of events happened at once. Emma Watts realized that R-rated comic book movies were a place where Fox could stand out from the rest of the movies being made there. It was a business opportunity. They could own that segment of the market. Then came Simon Kinberg, who was the gatekeeper of the Marvel stuff at Fox. Do I believe I would have directed it if this hadn’t been leaked? Maybe not. Perhaps they would have said, ‘You know what? I think this is a real movie, let’s get Robert Rodriguez in to direct it,” who had been attached to it before. Hollywood is not a fan of giving budding directors a chance without experience. Coincidentally, I was lucky.
The question of who leaked it Deadpool test shots have puzzled fans for years, and it looks like the mystery won’t be answered anytime soon. But if indeed it wasn’t Miller, as he insists, who was responsible? Most fingers naturally point to Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds, who clearly benefited greatly from playing Wade Wilson in the two international blockbusters that came directly from the leak of that short piece of test footage.
Reynolds, for his part, has never admitted to leaking the test images, but he has never denied it, which only makes people more suspicious. However, Reynolds once narrowed the list of possible suspects to just four: himself, Miller, and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. “One of us did it,” Reynolds once stated in an interview, adding “We all said at the beginning, ‘Someone should leak it. Someone should leak it.’“
Given cryptic statements like this, not to mention his well-known upbeat prankster, fans will remain convinced it was really Reynolds who leaked the footage. But whoever was responsible for bringing the test images out, they did a great service to Reynolds, Miller and a lot of other people, like Deadpool is now a full-fledged franchise. And even the MCU has come to ask the Merc With a Mouth, but it remains to be seen how much of its edge it will retain once it joins the Disney stable.
Source: Gang crew/YouTube
