Ryan Reynolds and Disney’s Marketing Spell

To say that Ryan Reynolds and Disney might have seemed like odd bedfellows when the studio inherited the R-rated Deadpool franchise following the Fox merger is an understatement.

Reynolds — who wears many hats, including actor, marketer, branding expert and entrepreneur — was at the heart of the audacious marketing campaigns for the two first films (look no further than the poop emoji billboard for the first Deadpool movie that went viral, or Deadpool re-enacting Burt Reynolds’ iconic Cosmopolitan centerfold). How far would Disney go in pushing the boundaries, considering it isn’t in the habit of releasing R-rated movies, at least in modern times? (Its division Marvel Studios never has.)

It turns out Disney’s Asad Ayaz, chief branding officer for the entire conglomerate and president of marketing for the film studio in addition to Disney+, and his team were all in. The mash-up of Disney’s expertise and reach and Reynolds’ marketing savvy, along with assistance from his own marketing firm, Maximum Effort, created a magic spell that helped turn Marvel’ record-smashing Deadpool & Wolverine into the top-grossing R-rated pic of all time. Its global earnings through Aug. 18 are a staggering $1.086 billion, and its run is far from over.

“To me, the biggest challenge was avoiding the more R-rated marketing instincts of Deadpool,” Reynolds tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The marketing was meant to feel all-audience audience as opposed to leaning into a specific comedy, action or superhero genre. The selection of collaborations sent a message about how broad we wanted to go — Heinz, Dave&Busters, NatGeo, TCM and Bachelorette — but so did the way we wrote them, which was playful but not third rail.”

Adds marketing wizard Ayaz, “The R rating actually worked in our favor because it helped differentiate the movie. The challenge was to get the broadest possible audience, especially people who may not have seen a Deadpool movie or may not have seen a Marvel movie yet, or haven’t seen a Marvel movie in a while. Marvel has a large audience now and a broad audience, and the importance of this team-up, which was a long time in the making, really helped us get there.”

Reynolds said the first two films had almost no partners (an exception was Mike’s Hard Lemonade). Early in the process of shooting Deadpool & Wolverine, Ayaz’s partnerships team, working closely with Reynolds, Levy and Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, came up with a list of strategic partners. “We didn’t get everyone on our list, but we got enough and then added others we weren’t expecting. It is unusual for an R-rated film, but we were always aiming for four-quadrant coverage — even though the film wasn’t exactly ‘safe,’” says Reynolds.

The no-holes-barred campaign was indeed unrivaled in scope for an R-rated film whose first trailer talked about “pegging” (blush). Disney and Maximum Effort were able to team with some of the world’s best-known brands, such as Heinz, and best-known media properties, including ABC’s The Bachelorette and Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County. Even National Geographic — which boasts one of the biggest social media followings the world — jumped on the Deadpool wagon via an upcoming nature documentary series that Reynolds is narrating, Underdogs, which will feature an episode about a real-life Wolverine. (ABC and Nat Geo are owned by Disney.)

Reynolds also programmed a night of movies for Turner Classic Movies. (He chose Grosse Pointe Blank and Planes, Trains and Automobiles.) And there was a pooch screening hosted by Peggy (the dog who played Dogpool) and attended by more than 20 of the top canine influencers on social media, along with Deadpool & Wolverine’s Leslie Uggams. The Best Friends Animal Society is also Disney’s official nonprofit partner and used donations to run a PSA across broadcast and print media highlighting pet adoptions.

Also in the weeks leading up to the film’s debut in the latter half of June, Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, who reprises his role as Wolverine, and director Shawn Levy embarked on whirlwind global publicity tour that spanned 10 cities across four continents, including China, where Marvel hasn’t dispatched any talent since Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Reynolds and Jackman also became the first top Hollywood stars to attend Korea’s largest music festival, the Waterbomb Festival. Other highlights: The trio attended the quarter-final match of the UEFA EUROs 2024, with Deadpool storming the field at the end of the game.

In regard to the number of brand partnerships — whose contributions are valued at $135 million — they were among the biggest for any MCU title. That’s in addition to a marketing spend by Disney of $100 million or more, the going rate for a summer tentpole. Maximum Effort ran point on some of the brand partnerships, including a major initiative with Heineken that included a spot with the characters Deadpool and Wolverine, and a collaboration with Adidas on a special line of shoes.

Perhaps the biggest jackpot of all in terms of brand partners was Heinz, which rarely teams with Hollywood. In this case, ketchup and mustard were a perfect pairing for Deadpool and Wolverine’s signature red and yellow costumes, respectively. “It got us into the cultural zeitgeist in a pretty great way,” says Ayaz.

Ayaz mentioned a few things he personally finds hilarious, including an Old Spice spot featuring Blind Al (Uggams) saying that the scent “fights stank 24/7,” in reference to her roommate, Deadpool. Another is an Xbox partnership that resulted in a game console with a controller shaped like Deadpool’s butt. (Ayaz’s team is certainly having a great summer overall, between Inside Out 2, The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and now Alien: Romulus.)

While it was announced in September 2022 that Jackman would join the cast of the third Deadpool movie, Wolverine’s character wasn’t revealed in a 2024 Super Bowl spot (instead, there was a flash of yellow). Reynolds says not showing Wolverine was an agonizing decision. “I’m glad we resisted the urge to reveal Hugh in the Super Bowl trailer. You never get that first impression back and it created more anticipation than any of us might have guessed. I’m glad this whole team knows the lesson from Jaws: What you don’t see is more provocative,” says Reynolds.

The trailer, dropping on Feb. 11 and revealing the official title, garnered a record 365 million views in its first 24 hours. However, Disney counted the Super Bowl telecast ratings in that figure, though the full trailer didn’t play on the telecast.

Reynolds and Feige promised that the customized popcorn bucket for the movie would rival the Dune sandstorm popcorn bucket in terms of being lewd and crude, and it didn’t disappoint fans in hinting at some sort of oral sexual activity. The buckets sold out almost immediately, and Disney says there was a spike in presales the day they became available. Next, there was a comical bleeped in-theater PSA featuring Reynold’s and Jackman’s characters telling people to turn their cellphones off — or rather half-bleeped.

“Given the very R-rated history of Deadpool, Disney’s marketing team was shockingly supportive,” says George Dewey, who runs Maximum Effort. He says he shouldn’t have been surprised by the willingness of Ayaz’s team to stretch its marketing muscle, considering Marvel and Disney had allowed so many of the irreverent and lewd jokes to be in the film in the first place. “They were just wanting to go there. I mean, the first trailer had the pegging joke, and has Deadpool calling himself Marvel Jesus.” (Marvel had suffered a rough patch before Deadpool & Wolverine opened to record numbers.)

Dewey, who worked on the first Deadpool movie when he was at 20th Century Fox, says being tapped into Disney has enormous benefits: “What Disney always does is broaden things. This character has caught fire in the big pond of Disney.”

In an Aug. 15 social media post announcing that Deadpool & Wolverine had passed up Joker to become the top-grossing R-rated film of all time, Reynolds included a snippet of the movie in which his character jokes, “Fuck Fox, I’m going to Disneyland.” There’s probably no better way to summarize what many would have considered unthinkable a few short years ago: a world in which Hollywood’s most kid-friendly studio welcomes with open arms Hollywood’s most foul-mouthed and R-rated antihero.