The big news in movies this weekend was Deadpool’s record-breaking opening: The film’s $135 million (and counting) box-office haul seems to have taken Hollywood executives by surprise, which is itself somewhat surprising considering that these are the same people who keep green lighting Transformers movies. Yes, no one ever went broke underestimating the maturity level of the American public, a fact that the mere existence of adult Underoos—now in Deadpool colors!—would seem to confirm.
Predictions that the film’s R rating would restrict its box office were similarly incorrect, a slightly more understandable assumption—after all, conventional wisdom dictates that, for a movie to make a boatload of money, it needs to be rated PG-13—except for the fact that kids today have access to the internet and therefore aren’t fazed by swear words. In fact, they fucking love them. Take this young Canadian boy with cancer Ryan Reynolds was fucking nice enough to befriend and screen Deadpool for before anyone else even saw the goddamn shit-sucking ass cock bitch of a movie:
Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls. This is my friend, Connor McGrath. He’s quite possibly the biggest #Deadpool fan on…
Posted by Ryan Reynolds on Friday, February 12, 2016
Still, the lesson Hollywood takes away from this won’t be that swear words are awesome, or even that Charles Band might have actually been on to something with all those R-rated horror movies clearly marketed towards 13-year-olds. It’ll probably be to make a bunch of lame Deadpool ripoffs, as Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn—who knows a thing or two about watching a good idea being test-marketed into nothingness—predicted this morning on Facebook: