‘Once Upon A Deadpool’ will play in Chinese cinemas starting on January 25.
‘Once Upon A Deadpool’Ryan Reynolds’ Twitter feed
News dropped this morning that Once Upon A Deadpool has passed through the Chinese censorship ringer and will open in China as early as January 25,2019. As I’ve said several times, the whole “cut Deadpool 2 down to a PG-13 and add self-aware interjections” thing wasn’t about making the Deadpool character safe for Walt Disney or the MCU, but rather making the character safe for China. Neither Deadpool nor Deadpool 2 played in what will soon be the biggest moviegoing territory around, because their unapologetic R-rated violence, gore and vulgarity (especially the vulgarity) didn’t have a prayer of making the cut.
But Once Upon A Deadpool is very much a PG-13 version of the picture (in a way that frankly makes the action sequences borderline incomprehensible), and yes it means that Deadpool 2 is going to China.
Once Upon A Deadpool played over the holiday season to mixed-negative notices and relatively minor domestic box office. The film, which features interludes of Ryan Reynolds’ masked superhero reading the movie as if it were a bedtime story to an adult Fred Savage who has been placed in his Princess Bride bedroom, earned just $6.083 million in North America after a month in theaters, with $993k overseas. That’s just enough to push Deadpool 2’s cumulative gross (provided you count them as a single movie) to $324m, which may be the difference between ranking above or below Aquaman on the 2018 domestic charts.
It, fortunately, did not pass the $327 million gross of It so I don’t have the haggle over whether to count the PG-13 cut of the movie toward its ranking on the R-rated grossers list.
