Ryan Reynolds' love for iconic ’90s divas is well-known, withDeadpool 2unexpectedly featuring a power ballad by Celine Dion. Now, the trailers for Reynold’s upcomingFree Guyhave confirmed that the movie heavily features Mariah Carey’s mega-hit 1995 songFantasy. In an interview with CinemaBlend,Free Guydirector Shawn Levy explained how the inclusion ofFantasyinto the movie’s soundtrack was due to Reynold’s love for the track.
“Credit where credit’s due. Ryan, when he was doing the earliest dialogue polishes on this screenplay, he was listening toMariahin his home, and he wrote “Fantasy” into the script. And I go, ‘What’s this about?’, and he’s like ‘It just feels good.’ So literally, based on nothing but Ryan’s instinct, and the fact that that was one of his writing tracks in the revisions of Free Guy, we approached Team Mariah and it lead to that song being the signature track. Not only in the movie, but in the campaign for the movie.”
Free Guytells the story of avideo game NPC(non-playable character), played by Reynolds, who one day achieves sentience, and sets out on his own adventure within the fictional city he calls home. According to Levy,Fantasyhas a bigger role to play in the movie’s narrative than simply serving as the background for the story’s events.
“I’ll dangle one other easter egg, which is… actually I won’t. [laughter] I’m so fucking sorry, dude. I’m really excited for you to see the movie, and you’ll realize that there’s a bunch of reasons why that track makes a lot of sense for the central protagonist. And there’s interesting ways that that track kind of gets played out in the movie.”
While there is no shortage ofvideo-game movie adaptationsin Hollywood,Free Guydeparts from tradition with a meta-narrative of a gaming character who one day realizes he is in a game and decides to forge his own path instead of doing what the game tells him to do. In this aspect,Free Guyis similar toWreck-It Ralph, andRyan Reynoldshas stated in the past that the upcoming movie is his favorite part of his filmography.
“I do think it’s the best movie-making experience that I’ve ever had, easily, but also the best movie I’ve ever done. It’s the most pertinent to our times, in that sense. Where I feel Deadpool was a movie that was pertinent to the comic book culture when it came out, this really to me speaks in a broader spectrum of where we are in the world and how we are in the world.”
Directed by Shawn Levy,Free Guyfeatures a lead cast of Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Joe Keery, Lil Rel Howery, Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Taika Waititi. The film is set to arrive in theaters on December 11, although that date is likely to change as the majority of upcoming Hollywood blockbusters have been forced to postpone their release dates in light of the continuing shutdown of cinemas. This news comes fromCinemablend.
