As part of our year-end coverage, revisit that story below.
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Deadpoolwasnt supposed to work.
Was it the R-rating?
Had the superhero audience grown tired of neutered PG-13 fare that could never go the extra gory mile?
Did theDeadpoolreturns act as an extension of Marvel Studios win withGuardians of the Galaxyand its irreverent sense of humor?
Wed guess it was probably that last one.
And Marc Weinstock, the head of domestic marketing at Fox, would agree with that assessment.
They had two big fears, he said.
One was the costume, and two was the R-rating.
This is some abomination.'
The solution was two-fold.
This image…
And then this video… Ryan was a huge partner in this, Weinstock said.
We came up with a bunch of crazy ideas, and he was like, Great!
He put on the suit five or six times for full day of shoots on special content.
The fans who watched Deadpool kill Mario Lopez and announce an R-rating were always going to see it.
So they had a code they wanted to crack, Weinstock said of the billboards.
When they figured it out, they had to tell someone.
Though these examples were certainly the loudest, they represented a small fraction of Foxs marketing output.
This included buying out all of the ad space forthree hours of content across five Viacom networks.
Because were R-rated, we cant get teenagers, so how do we get a bunch of adults?'
So maybe there is a lesson here.
Or, as Weinstock puts it, Originality always wins.
When you show something to the audience that theyve never seen before, they get excited.
