Deadpool is coming in 2016 after being revived by a sudden groundswell of interest, mostly thanks to that leaked test footage. What’s interesting, though, is that apparently nobody who could directly profit from that leak pulled it off.
Ryan Reynolds spoke to Yahoo! Movies, plugging his dark comedy The Voices, and immediately got asked about Deadpool.
Honestly, we all thought Tim Miller, the director, had leaked it. But I have since investigated that enough, in quiet moments when he was beyond the point of being penalized by anybody, and he said that he really didn’t do it. The initial [leak] came from Fox they think — someone recorded the footage on their iPhone and then released it. And then once that happened, somebody hacked into Blurred Studios and got the original footage in high-res and put it online.
He also noted that everyone involved debated leaking the footage, but to his knowledge, no one did. As for whether or not Reynolds is right about the source of the leak… truthfully, it’s a bit suspicious. Perhaps it wasn’t somebody from Blur Studios or Reynolds who leaked it, but once the positive reaction to the clip hit the Internet, Fox moved surprisingly quickly to secure everyone involved in what they thought was a dead project and give them a budget.
So perhaps it was hackers, or perhaps Fox decided to see just how much people wanted the Merc with a Mouth. We’ll likely never know, but at least we’re getting a movie out of it.
