Ryan Reynolds reveals details on R-rated ‘Star Wars’ movie pitch

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After spearheading Marvel’s first R-rated superhero movie with last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds says he has made a similar pitch to take the Star Wars universe in a different direction.

“I pitched to Disney, I said, ‘Why don’t we do an R-rated Star Wars property? It doesn’t have to be overt, A+ characters. There’s a wide range of characters you could use,’” he said in an interview with Scott Mendelson’s The Box Office podcast. “And I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”

Star Wars has experimented with darker storylines, most recently in its two-season Rogue One spinoff Andor, but the franchise has firmly remained in the PG realm.

Reynolds said he liked the idea of expanding the story as a way to “surprise” Star Wars fans. But his story wasn’t one that he was angling to star in.

“I’m not saying I want to be in it. That would be a bad fit,” he said. “I’d want to produce and write or be a part of behind the scenes. Those kinds of IP subsist really well on scarcity and surprise. We don’t get scarcity really with Star Wars because of Disney+, but you can certainly still surprise people.”

Putting something darker onto streaming, which Disney has also tried with last year’s Acolyte series is more likely, but Reynolds insisted to Mendelson that an R-rated big screen adventure would leave a more lasting impression.

“You’re never going to get the same emotional investment from a streamer that you are from a theatrical movie, because they’re getting in cars and paying for parking, and babysitters, and sitting down, and watching the movie, and then driving home. That’s the emotional investment you can try to sell,” he said.

“On a streamer, my only note, always, is that, for God’s sake, with everything you can, to grab them in that first shot, like that first thing that happens in the movie… Start with something, ‘Holy s—!’ and then, ‘How did we get here?'”

People sitting at home can quickly become disengaged in a way they can’t when they’re at the cinema.

“We have all these distracto-fat things clogging our arteries of attention, and it is so easy to tune out unless you have them right at the top,” he said.

Before it was reimagined into The Book of Boba Fett TV series, James Mangold, who is slated to write and direct an upcoming Star Wars film, eyed his own take on the intergalactic bounty hunter that was “borderline rated-R.”

“At the point I was doing it, I was probably scaring the s— out of everyone, but I was probably making much more of a borderline rated-R, single-planet, spaghetti western,” Mangold told the Happy Sad Confused podcast in a 2023 interview. “The world would never be able to embrace Baby Yoda if I had made that, because he didn’t really belong in the world I was kind of envisioning.”

Mangold’s new entry will focus on the dawn of the Jedi, but he said that writing his earlier Boba Fett movie was a “beautiful period” in his life. 

“I was just listening to Ennio Moricone all day, all night and typing away,” he said. “But I’m not sure it ever would’ve happened. I’m not sure it was in anyone’s plans what I was thinking about.”

After Andor wrapped its second season earlier this month, the Star Wars universe will expand with a Mandalorian spinoff movie hitting theatres next May. Reynolds’ Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy is also set to go into production on Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling later this year.

The plot is still under wraps, but Levy announced at Star Wars Celebration last month that the film will take place roughly five years after the events of 2019’s Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker.

“This is a standalone adventure that takes place a few years after the events of Episode IX,” the filmmaker teased. “What could that mean? It could mean so many things … This is not a prequel. This is not a sequel. It’s a new adventure.”

Also on the horizon: a new trilogy from X-Men scribe Simon Kinberg, a Star Wars film directed by Taika Waititi, and the return of Daisy Ridley as Rey in a film helmed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.

mdaniell@postmedia.com