Last year, the Walt Disney Company acquired 21st Century Fox for a cool $66.1 billion, meaning 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox 2000, 20th Century Fox Television, FX Productions, FX Networks, and Fox Sports Regional Networks, among others, all fall under one mouse-shaped umbrella. The deal won’t be finalized until “spring-summer 2019 and end of summer 2019 at the latest,” so Marvel fans hoping for a surprise appearance from the X-Men in Avengers 4 are in for a letdown. Speaking of disappointments: Ryan Reynolds claims 20th Century Fox made him cut a joke about Disney from Deadpool 2.
“This is a sore spot for me because there’s a joke in the movie that is not in the movie now because — I’m probably not even allowed to say this — Fox made me take it out,” the actor told Entertainment Weekly. “It had more to do with Disney, and they made me take it out.” Reynolds called removing the joke a “wise decision,” but this censorship maybe sets a dangerous precedent for when Disney inevitably owns 75 percent of the world’s corporations. You think your crack about The Lizzie McGuire Movie on Twitter went unnoticed? Just you wait.
As for whether Disney plans to shake up the winning Deadpool formula, Reynolds says, “I really genuinely don’t know a thing about it. I read that [chairman and CEO] Bob Iger felt that there’s plenty of room in that universe to have a rated-R character like Deadpool. This is completely conjecture on my part, but I wouldn’t imagine that Disney bought Fox to dismantle it or something like that. I think that Disney bought Fox so it could have that in its arsenal.”
Disney’s first R-rated film was 1986’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, so they’ve gone from Nick Nolte playing a suicidal homeless man to Deadpool performing an interpretative dance next to Celine Dion. The more things change…
(Via Entertainment Weekly)