What marketing maestro Ryan Reynolds can teach YOU!

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Deadpool & Wolverine has just opened to the BIGGEST ever Box Office haul for an R-rated movie, defying the critics and proving that Marvel is BACK baby. And this $1bn Box Office haul was ALL a consequence of the marketing genius of its star, Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds has become the world’s most bankable movie star, a hugely successful businessman, and a visionary marketer. He’s changing the game, reinventing the wheel, and breaking up how YOU should be doing business. So what lessons should you be taking away from the heir to David Ogilvy, the Leo Burnett of the TikTok generation? Here are 5 quick learnings — straight from Ryan Reynolds’s personal philosophy — that you can apply directly to your marketing plan.

Be extremely handsome and/or beautiful.

Think about a successful person. Hold an image of them in your head. Ok: were they beautiful? I’ll bet the answer is yes. Reynolds has shown the power of being beautiful as a marketing tool. He’s ingeniously harnessed people’s desire to look at his face and/or body, which RADICALLY increases his communication skills. If you aren’t beautiful — don’t worry! You can just more closely adhere to the other pointers from the Reynolds Method™ or you can go to Türkiye and have some back-alley plastic surgery. The choice is yours!

Be wildly famous.

Think about a famous person. Hold an image of them in your head. Ok: was it Ryan Reynolds? Because the next part of Reynolds’s genius is how famous he is! If he does anything — goes to the bodega, posts on Twitter, farts on an airplane — the media is going to cover it. This is a BRILLIANT way of getting more attention on your brand or business. To become a household name, you can either do it the old-fashioned way — by building a multi-decade Hollywood career — or the modern way — becoming a spree killer. Either way, being super well-known is a KEY part of the Reynolds Method™.

Have a hot wife.

Ideally, your hot wife will also be famous and successful in her own right. But the key thing is that she fills in a demographic blank. Not likely to be booked on the cover of Vogue? Get your hot wife to do it! Unlikely to be offered a ticket to the Met Gala? Get your hot wife to procure them! Want to salt-the-earth for all competitors during a single theatrical release window? Get your hot wife to release a movie, in a different genre, at the same time! The important thing here is that you’re both selling the idea that you’re better than EVERYONE else. People don’t buy stuff from people they think have shitty little mole-man lives. They buy stuff from Ryan Reynolds.

Build a portfolio of successful businesses leveraged against your beauty, fame and hot wife.

Do you know how much Ryan Reynolds is reported to have been paid for Deadpool & Wolverine? $20m. Twenty. Million. Dollars. That’s nothing; peanuts to a man like Ryan Reynolds. That doesn’t really compare to the $610m sale of his company, Aviation Gin, to drinks magnate Diageo. The important thing is to build a HOLISTIC vision for the commercialisation of your corporeal form. Why content yourself with a single eye-watering salary when you could also use that project as product placement in order to gouge credulous fanboys and make them purchase overpriced gin or flexible mobile plans? The genius of the Reynolds Method™ is that, when they’re so ubiquitous, it doesn’t really matter if any of these products are actually good.

Buy a football club.

This is a no-brainer. Can you think of an unsuccessful person who owns a football club? I doubt it. Buying a football club not only makes you feel like a local bigwig, but you also get to use it like a private equity vehicle to store social cachet debt. Want to appeal to Europeans? Buy a European football club. Want to appear grounded? Buy a crap football club. Want to seem socially conscious? Regenerate small pockets of the local area during this extensive, profit-making exercise. And don’t forget: the football club isn’t really a football club. It’s a vehicle for your other business interests. So why not whack your gin on the training kit and stick your star striker in your next movie? But what can you do if you can’t, currently, afford to buy a football club? Well, the first thing you should do is go back to Step 1 of the Reynolds Method™, follow it carefully, and by the time you’re back here at Step 5, surely you’ll have a few spare million dollars knocking about?

For more marketing tips, please subscribe to my Substack or listen to my podcast. Oh, and stop posting bullshit articles on LinkedIn about what I can learn from celebrities. Everyone knows life is easy when you’re rich and famous: I could no more learn business tips from Ryan Reynolds than my dog could learn tricks from Shamu.