Contrary to what the P&A budget for Minions will have you believe, there are other movies opening this weekend. It's a big weekend in the top markets for LGBT releases. And nationwide a horror movie (The Gallows) and a new sci-fi body swap thriller Self/Less starring Ben Kingsley & Ryan Reynolds are also opening. I read a headline yesterday lamenting
WTF happened to Ryan Reynolds's career?"
Ryan Reynolds in his first real year of stardom (2002) and now (2015). Images from Buying the Cow and Self/Less
And I thought: Well... nothing. It's always been this way!
He first won semi-stardom in 2002 frequently displaying his then amazing body (it wasn't the norm for male stars to look like cartoon superheroes OUT of costume just 12 years ago) in the popular college comedy Van Wilder and the lesser seen romantic comedy Buying the Cow. Since then it's been a constant annual barrage of mainstream comedies, mainstream action and franchise pics, and mainsteam horror. Some of his movies were barely screened or went straight to DVD but even those were populist ventures. Either Reynolds or his management just haven't had ambitions outside the multiplex. This has only very recently begun to change with experiments like Buried (good) and The Voices (terrible) which fit comfortably into populist genres but still were plainly too weird --even in screenplay stages -- for mass appeal. He's been perpetually "on the verge" but has never achieved anything beyond the B list. Okay, the B+ list.
So how many of his 24 pictures (excluding voice work and cameos) have you seen since his 2002 breakthrough? The posters are after the jump...
The In-Laws, Foolproof, and Blade Trinity
Amityville Horror, Waiting, Just Friends
Smoking Aces, The Nines and Definitely Maybe
Fireflies in the Garden (barely released. Strange as it had multiple famous actors), Chaos Theory, and Adventureland
X-Men Origins Wolverine, The Proposal (his biggest hit - but it was Sandra Bullock's biggest year ever) and Paperman
Buried, Green Lantern, The Change-Up
Safe House, RIPD, The Voices
The Captive, Woman in Gold and Self/Less
Next up is the action comedy Deadpool, which will be his fifth superhero-related picture -- though none have been successful enough for him to reprise his role until now. And for a long while it looked like that spinoff (from X-Men Origins: Wolverine) wasn't going to happen. Deadpool's social media team and Ryan Reynolds himself seem to have a great sense of humor about the forthcoming picture which might help it open bigger than his usual films unless a superhero backlash or superhero fatigue settles in before then. He's already posed for a Burt Reynold style photoshoot and just retweeted a fan made spoof of the Hunger Games teaser poster starring him instead.
SO HOW MANY OF HIS PICTURES HAVE YOU SEEN? I've only seen 8 but I remember some of them coming out and steering well clear for reasons of genre (Amityville Horror), reviews (RIPD) or disinterest (Just Friends -- remember that whole craze of putting pretty actors in fat suits in comedies in the Aughts?) and others I'm scratching my head trying to place, as in: Is that really a movie that exists?
Do you think his career will ever change -- he turns 40 next year (not that that stops male actors) -- or will he just keep on keeping on as he always has mixing nobody saw them failures with occassional modest hits?