“Deadpool” Test Footage

According to Rob Liefeld, the famed test footage for the original Deadpool movie was made on the same weekend that Green Lantern was released.

“That footage was filmed in 2011,” said Liefeld in a Q&A session with Collider. “Ryan [Reynolds] filmed that the weekend Green Lantern came out. I was at Blur studios. Ryan filmed that the weekend Green Lantern was opening, that’s how old that footage is!”

Liefeld is the original creator of Deadpool, introducing him in February 1991’s The New Mutants #98. Meanwhile Reynolds plays Deadpool in the big screen, as well as starring as Hal Jordan in the aforementioned 2011 Green Lantern film.

Both characters have give him a bumpy ride. Reynolds first played the Merc With a Mouth in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a generally bad film which did an infamously bad attempt at adapting Deadpool. Nevertheless, a spin-off with a more traditional take on the character was intended for a spin-off, and in the meantime Reynolds found work on Green Lantern, about a jerk pilot who becomes a space cop/superhero.

Green Lantern was intended to launch a DC Comics shared universe, but the film was a critical and financial flop; Reynolds himself has talked about various problems that make the movie fall flat. So it is interesting, in a way, to know that at the same time his potential DC Comics career was failing at the box office, Reynolds was off creating his true superheroic legacy.

The test footage, which can be seen here, was shelved for three years, making it seem like a Deadpool film was dead in the water. Then, in 2014, is somehow got leaked online. It was a huge success with fans, and as a result, the Deadpool movie finally went into production.

It is not clear who released the footage, though according to Liefeld, Fox knows and has simply decided not to punish the culprit. Given the huge amounts of money that they’ve made from Deadpool and its sequel, this is understandable.

Green Lantern, meanwhile, has gone to have its own legacy… as a joke in the ever-meta Deadpool movies. That shared universe it was supposed to start got scrapped, to replaced by the ongoing DC Extended Universe.