Videos by ComicBook.com
Jackman and Reynolds appeared on the hit show Hot Ones, where host Sean Evans asked about the difference between knowing when leaks for a movie are beneficial, and when they’re bad. For example: the “leak” of test footage director Tim Miller shot for a Deadpool movie is ultimately what got 20th Century Fox to greenlight the project. However, the 2009 leak of the entire X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie onto torrent sites was not so great for Jackman:
“I can give the example of a bad leak. X-Men Origins: Wolverine…it was leaked maybe a week before we came out, and I think I just remember someone saying and I think it’s up to 10 million people had seen it before it’d come out,” Jackson explained. “That’s a bad leak.”
The leak of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) was a definite low point for the X-Men franchise – for a lot of reasons. The film was tripped up by the 2007-2008 Writers Strike in Hollywood, resulting in a less-than-stellar storyline for director Gavin Hood to work from. The leak allowed tens of millions of viewers to see a workprint version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine that didn’t even have finished visual effects, causing even more backlash. Before memes were even really a thing, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a meme representing just how bad a movie can turn out. During the interview, Reynolds joked that the leak of Wolverine got a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than the actual film, perfectly skewering both hard hits the film took.
The silver lining was that the utter crash and burn of X-Men Origins: Wolverine led to the franchise taking a whole new direction with James Mangold’s Wolverine films, The Wolverine and Logan – the latter of which is widely regarded as one of the best comic book movies there is. It’s been a full-turn journey for Jackman – and Deadpool & Wolverine is about to take his legacy to the next level.
Deadpool & Wolverine is now in theaters.
