Leaked Deadpool footage was great news for Ryan Reynolds

A few minutes of Deadpool test footage leaked onto the Internet in July of last year, and by December it was announced that the movie was back in active development. So what happened to convince the studio?

"Leaked test footage. Exclusively the leaked test footage, 100 percent," Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds confirmed in an interview with Yahoo Movies. He went a bit further, claiming that many people attached to the project had been tempted to leak the footage in the past.

"I was excited, because you can look back at an email chain from all of us, the core group involved in Deadpool, saying 'We should leak this, f—-,' like three years ago," Reynolds said. "Saying, 'Hey, if this thing is going to stagnate, one of us should just say 'Whoops, I slipped it online by accident.'' And nobody seemed to want to nut up and do that, myself included. Someone did it for us, years later, when we all completely assumed it was dead in the water."

He also claimed that he doesn't know who leaked the footage.

"I would have, if I had known it would have caused that!" Reynolds exclaimed.

"Honestly, we all thought Tim Miller, the director, had leaked it. But I have since investigated that enough, in quiet moments when he was beyond the point of being penalized by anybody, and he said that he really didn’t do it. The initial [leak] came from Fox they think — someone recorded the footage on their iPhone and then released it. And then once that happened, somebody hacked into Blur Studios and got the original footage in high-res and put it online."

The rest of the interview includes some interesting tidbits about Reynolds' less-successful films, and is worth a read. Even if the budget isn't as high as other superhero movies, it's great to be in a world where Deadpool is being made.