Playing 'pool.

So I just told dear pal Levi that Ryan Reynolds (presently of the romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe) will be portraying the Merc With A Mouth, Deadpool, in the upcoming Wolverine movie.

Levi's reaction was an unintelligible odd high-pitched shrieky noise that lasted something like half a minute. I think he was happy. I think the reason he was happy was that he knows as well as I do that, where the Wolverine movie is a spin-off of the X-Men franchise, it's probably being positioned for a Deadpool movie to spin-off of it, what with Reynolds being kind of a guy who can carry a movie on his own (see the aforementioned romantic comedy, which is being pretty well-received at the moment) and bearing in mind the fact that he's bandied about the notion of playing Deadpool in a movie of his own for a few years now.

And remember, Deadpool has been more or less consistently headlining a book with his name in the title for about ten years now. That would include two four-issue limited series, sixty-nine issues of his own book, fifty issues of Cable & Deadpool, a handful of one-shots and annuals, and sort-of the sixteen-issue(?) Agent X experiment. (It was a continuation of his title with a similar, related lead.) People like the 'pool. They like him because he's an entertaining, half-mad anti-hero who talks to the camera, Spider-Man without the worry or the moral compass -- or the commentary limited to thought balloons/captions.

And seriously, that first run on the ongoing series by Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness? Solid gold. Back in either '01 or '02, Levi loaned me all that. Dear god that's some great self-contained, crossover-free, character-centered action-adventure comics right there.

So many interesting franchise movie developments going on these days. Marvel's really building a little interlocking movie universe (or two -- the X-stuff is still at Fox, while their Avengers stuff is in-house), which is kinda neat.