Ryan Reynolds Says Deadpool is an 11 Year Dream Come True

While many fans know that Deadpool has been a long time coming, they may not know just how long. Actor Ryan Reynolds originally signed on for a Deadpool film in 2004. Since then, the film has gone up and down the 20th Century Fox ladder, until it was all-but dead.

After a script was written and several years of back-and-forth, Reynolds then teamed with Tim Miller and Blur Studio to make a demo reel - just to show what kind of fun could be had. When it leaked, the movie finally came to life; Fox couldn't deny the excitement when fans (and sites like this) made the leaked footage incredibly popular.

"For me, this is 11-years-of-a-dream come true," Reynolds told fans at a surprise early screening of the film in NYC. "Every single second I got to spend making this movie, being a part of it, wearing the makeup, wearing the suit – all that crap that is usually kind of aggravating, it was – I couldn't complain for a second of it."

Reynolds took a much larger role in the development of the film than most stars tend to for a movie like this. While not officially listed in roles like "writer" or "editor," the actor went back and forth on the script with the writers, worked closely with the director, and even spent some time in the editing bay with them, deciding which jokes would make it in, a fact he said will mean a "shit ton of DVD extras."

"It was six years of Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and I going back and forth on pages on the script. They have our emails from six years ago, still, when we plot out the exact beats of the movie. I wish we lived in a paper age still, it would be great to have those things framed," Reynolds said of his long work on the film.

Now it's just a few weeks out, and Reynolds and the team are "so excited to show fans" what they've made. A decade plus in the making, Deadpool hits theaters February 12, 2016.