Disney, if you’re listening, Ryan Reynolds knows how to save your franchise.

The Deadpool & Wolverine star, co-writer, and producer recently revealed he visited the House of Mouse with a novel concept for a new Star Wars project.

“I pitched to Disney, I said, ‘Why don’t we do an R-rated Star Wars property?’” he shared on Sunday’s episode of The Box Office Podcast. “It doesn’t have to be overt, A+ characters, there’s a wide range of characters you could use, and I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated is a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”

Reynolds, who became the world’s second-highest paid actor in 2024 after the phenomenal success of the above-mentioned Marvel mash-up, has increasingly taken on producing and other behind-the-camera positions ever since he boarded 2016’s first Deadpool film as a producer.

Though he may seem like a natural fit to star in his Star Wars pitch, he clarified, “I’m not saying I want to be in it — that would be a bad fit. I would want to produce and write or be a part of behind the scenes.”

The Star Wars franchise, first inaugurated by George Lucas with 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, began as a gamble and has always heavily trafficked in emotionally resonant themes such as loss, betrayal, and revenge. Not to mention the unmissable and complex political allegories woven through each of the film trilogies and the subsequent proliferation of series, including Andor and The Mandalorian.

But Reynolds seemed mainly to have those series in mind when discussing his Star Wars idea; in particular, the fact of their exhibition over streaming rather than in a theatrical setting.

“You’re never going to get the same emotional investment from a streamer that you are from a theatrical movie, because they’re getting in cars and paying for parking, and babysitters, and sitting down, and watching the movie, and then driving home. That’s the emotional investment you can try to sell,” he said.

To Reynolds, an R rating unlocks the emotional punch needed to deliver the tougher sell over streaming: “On a streamer, my only note, always, is that, for God’s sake, with everything you can, to grab them in that first shot, like that first thing that happens in the movie… Start with something, ‘Holy s—!’ and then, ‘How did we get here?’”

“Streamers, I think that model is even more important because we have all these distracto-fat things clogging our arteries of attention, and it is so easy to tune out unless you have them right at the top,” he said.

The highest rating a Star Wars film ever got was PG-13, the rating consistently applied to films in the franchise since 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

Reynolds’ idea to push the franchise into more provocative territory isn’t a new one, and the outcome of the previous attempt might worry him. James Mangold, who was tapped to co-write and direct an upcoming Star Wars film in 2023, was previously attached to a Boba Fett origin story. That film eventually became the Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett, but Mangold had originally envisioned his film as “much more of a borderline rated-R, single-planet, spaghetti Western.”

“I was probably scaring the s— out of everyone,” he joked, noting that the major players behind Star Wars “suddenly decided they weren’t making pictures like that, and I think the opportunities in streaming presented themselves.”

You can listen to the rest of Reynolds’ interview on The Box Office Podcast above.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly