Ryan Reynolds has a good feeling about this. The Deadpool star reveals he pitched an R-rated Star Wars project to Disney, which released last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine — not only the first Marvel Studios movie to receive an R rating, but the highest-grossing R-rated film in history with $1.33 billion at the global box office. With Marvel moving into the mature space occupied by Disney and 20th Century Studios’ R-rated sci-fi franchises like Alien and Predator, Reynolds argues that the galaxy far, far away can go far, far beyond a PG or PG-13 rating.
“I pitched to Disney, I said, ‘Why don’t we do an R-rated Star Wars property?’” Reynolds shared on on a recent 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.”
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Reynolds, also a producer who received his first writing credit as a co-writer (with Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick) on 2018’s Deadpool 2 before scripting Deadpool & Wolverine with Reese & Wernick, Zeb Wells, and director Shawn Levy, 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.”
Andor, the Rogue One prequel series about the burgeoning rebellion against the Galactic Empire, already pushed the boundaries of Star Wars with mature storytelling and, in the second season, an attempted rape scene. It was a first for a franchise that has gone no further than PG-13 (starting with 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith) and TV-14 (with such streaming series as The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, and Andor).
“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,” Reynolds explained. “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.
Reynolds also pushed the former Fox X-Men movies franchise into R-rated territory with 2016’s Deadpool, which was followed by the R-rated, James Mangold-directed Logan in 2017. Mangold later revealed that the planned Boba Fett: A Star Wars Story movie he was developing was envisioned as “a borderline-rated R spaghetti Western” before the Boba Fett spinoff was reworked into a TV-14 series on Disney+.
“At the point I was doing it, I was probably scaring the sh-t out of everyone,” Mangold said in 2023, adding that “in a moment of corporate realignment after whatever happened with the Han Solo movie, they just suddenly decided they weren’t making pictures like that. I think the opportunities, streaming, presented themselves.”
In fact, The Mandalorian and Grogu — a feature film continuation of The Mandalorian TV series — will be the first Star Wars film since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker when it blasts into theaters in May 2026. And it will likely be rated PG-13.
Before creator George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney, he was developing the live-action series Star Wars: Underworld, which producer Rick McCallum described as “much darker” and “much more adult” than the films — like The Empire Strikes Back “on steroids.”
“These were dark. These were sexy, they were violent,” McCallum said recently of the unproduced scripts. “They were just absolutely wonderful, complicated, challenging. I mean, it would have blown up the whole Star Wars universe, and Disney definitely would have never offered George to buy the company.”
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