See Ryan Reynolds Take Advantage of Public Domain In Winnie-the-Screwed
See Ryan Reynolds send up Winnie-the-Pooh by creating Winnie-the-Screwed after the former entered the public domain this year.
This article is more than 2 years old
Ryan Reynolds kind of just gets it. What does he get exactly? Well, just “it”. The dude has made a career on the big, and sometimes small screen with a devil-may-care exterior and shrewd decision-making around projects and endorsements. It all kind of works and he’s pulled off another hilarious little sound bite recently with a public domain shakeup. It seems the iconic character Winnie-the-Pooh is now available for general use. Reynolds and company were quick to jump out and use that to their advantage.
In a commercial for Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds first explained why they’d be able to use the name and likeness of Winnie-the-Pooh to their heart’s delight. The move into the public domain for preexisting IP tends to happen at the turn of a calendar year, so January 1st was the first chance for anyone to use the character any way they felt appropriate. For Reynolds, it was creating a new character, Winnie-the-Screwed, to describe what happens when someone is getting raked over the coals by their wireless provider. Check out Ryan Reynolds and his reimagining of the popular character.
In his best, “I’m reading a child a book to go to sleep” voice, Ryan Reynolds gives us the “story” of Winnie-the-Screwed who is taken advantage of by Big Wireless. The character in the story is Edward Bear, but you get the point of what they are trying to do here. It’s just being playful around the idea of the character, knowing they can have a laugh at the expense of a beloved, but rather sad character. It’s a quick hitter, meant to get Ryan Reynolds with a little snark out in front of the camera. It looks like they shot this in about 10 minutes.
As for Ryan Reynolds, when he is reappropriating timeless children’s characters for endorsement purposes, he’s busy starring in some of the biggest movies out there. Over the summer, he crushed with Free Guy, an original story that might be spawning a franchise. He plays a video game NPC who finds out that A: he’s actually in the game and B: is about to become the hero. The movie scored well with both critics and at the box office. It’s sitting at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned more than $330 million in sales, a solid number considering theaters were just starting to move back to full capacity.
And then there was the recent team up with Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson, and Gal Gadot in Netflix’s Red Notice. It’s already become the most-watched original movie in the history of the streamer for the first 28-day window. Did it score as well with critics? No, but that really wasn’t the point. This was supposed to be a popcorn flick with some of the biggest names in the industry. For what they were setting out to do, mission accomplished.
Of course, we are all waiting for the big Ryan Reynolds future movie. That’s going to be Deadpool 3 which will be the character’s film since moving officially over to Disney and into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There hasn’t been a ton of news on this front after reports that Reynolds was at odds with the studio over the tone of the film now that it’s under the Disney banner.
