Everything Ryan Reynolds touches these days seems to turn to gold, figuratively speaking. His current Midas touch has transcended his acting career, as evidenced by his continually evolving business empire, which includes his ownership of the Welsh football club Wrexham, as documented in the television series Welcome to Wrexham. With the possible exception of pop star Taylor Swift, Reynolds is arguably the hottest celebrity brand in the world.
His current lofty status, which has been boosted by the blockbuster success of Deadpool & Wolverine, is in stark contrast to what Reynolds experienced a decade ago, when the disastrous failure of the 2013 supernatural action comedy film R.I.P.D., following the failure of his 2011 superhero film Green Lantern, put the actor’s Hollywood starring career in jeopardy and compelled him to abandon the blockbuster genre and reevaluate his career goals.
This ensuing period of introspection resulted in the most diverse and interesting collection of performances in Reynolds’ career. Moreover, if Green Lantern and R.I.P.D. had realized their franchise potential, he would likely have been precluded from playing the titular antihero in the Deadpool film series, which has redefined his career and made the increasingly forgotten R.I.P.D. seem like a bad dream.
R.I.P.D. Is Ryan Reynolds’ Biggest Flop
Before R.I.P.D., Ryan Reynolds, who made his feature starring debut in the 2002 comedy film Van Wilder, had his greatest commercial success as a leading man with the 2009 romantic comedy film The Proposal and the 2012 thriller Safe House. However, the success of The Proposal was largely credited to star Sandra Bullock, as was the case with Denzel Washington in Safe House.
Between those two films, Reynolds starred as the titular superhero character in Green Lantern, which easily represented the severest test of his star power until that point in his career. With a production cost of $200 million, Green Lantern was intended to launch both the DC Extended Universe and a Green Lantern film series. However, the box-office failure of Green Lantern, which grossed just under $220 million at the worldwide box office, killed these plans and raised serious doubts about Reynolds’ box-office drawing power.
Despite the failure of Green Lantern, Reynolds agreed to star in R.I.P.D., which is based on the 1999 comic book series of the same name. In R.I.P.D., Reynolds plays Nick Walker, a Boston police detective who, after being betrayed and murdered by his partner, is recruited into the Rest in Peace Department, where Nick, who appears as an elderly Asian man to the living, is partnered with a long-dead Old West lawman, played by Jeff Bridges.
After an opening-weekend gross of $12.7 million, far below the more than $53 million domestic opening for Green Lantern, the critically-reviled R.I.P.D. finished its theatrical run with a dismal $33.6 million domestic total and a worldwide total of less than $80 million. R.I.P.D., which posted a considerably greater financial loss than Green Lantern, became one of the biggest financial disasters of its era, in addition to its reputation for being one of the worst comic-book adaptations in history. In a 2015 Los Angeles Times interview, Reynolds said:
“I’ve done movies that I shouldn’t have done because they were going to pay me, and that was at the time very appealing and exciting. When you arrive in Hollywood, and you come from where I come from, you think, ‘Of course. I’m [going] to do that.”
Reynolds Avoided Blockbusters After R.I.P.D.
Following R.I.P.D., Ryan Reynolds entered a phase in his career where he prioritized artistic quality over commercial appeal. He followed R.I.P.D. with the 2014 horror comedy film The Voices, in which he plays a delusional factory worker who becomes convinced that his pets are speaking to him and are trying to coerce him into committing murder. Despite receiving excellent reviews, The Voices only grossed approximately $2.2 million at the box office.
In the modestly budgeted 2014 thriller film The Captive, Reynolds gives a powerful dramatic performance as an anguished father whose daughter has been abducted. However, The Captive, directed by Atom Egoyan, received negative reviews and only grossed approximately $2 million at the box office.
However, following Captive, Reynolds received some of the best reviews of his career for his layered performance as a degenerate gambler in the 2015 comedy-drama film Mississippi Grind, which, despite receiving excellent reviews from critics, grossed less than $500,000 at the box office. During this period, Reynolds showed little concern for his Hollywood star status, which he eschewed in establishing himself as an accomplished character actor. In the 2015 biographical drama film Woman in Gold, the actor disappears into the role of a young lawyer who attempts to help an elderly Jewish woman, played by Helen Mirren, reclaim family possessions that were stolen by the Nazis.
One of the best performances in Reynolds’ career can be found in a film that predates Green Lantern and R.I.P.D., the claustrophobic 2010 thriller Buried, in which he is riveting as an Iraq-based truck driver who has been buried alive in a wooden coffin with only a few assorted items, most notably a lighter and phone, with which he can make contact with the outside world and possibly gain freedom.
Deadpool Transformed Reynolds’ Career
With a current worldwide box-office gross of nearly $1.3 billion, Deadpool & Wolverine has easily become the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, a record previously held by Joker. While the success of the Deadpool film series has turned Reynolds into a brand, his now trademark sarcastic Deadpool persona has carried over to the rest of his career.
His recent acting career has become virtually entirely defined by playing characters whose wisecracking exterior disguises their serious vulnerabilities, as seen in the 2021 action comedy film Free Guy and the 2022 action comedy film The Adam Project. The result is that Reynolds’ films, while undeniably entertaining, have become increasingly derivative, not unlike what happened in 2013, when he faced the biggest crossroads of his career. His latest film, Deadpool & Wolverine, is in theaters now.
