Finding laughs amidst the ugliness has been a crucial lifeline for many during 2020's fast-paced line-up of kidney punches, and Ryan Reynolds' quirky marketing firm Maximum Effort has been a weird but reliable source of mirth. With the awareness and sass required to take on, well, everything this year has offered, Reynolds has unveiled a new ad campaign for dating service Match.com. The unholy romantic union of Satan and the perky physical embodiment of 2020 is note perfect parody. And, like an artist leaving his signature on a new painting, Reynolds made sure to sneak in a joke at the X-Men's expense.
Among all the other visual gags and funny twists on classic romantic dialogue, Satan takes his new date to the movies. Due to COVID-19, the theater is just as empty as the football fields and parks where the couple have taken lovely walks together. But to really rub salt into the wound, the film the new lovebirds are enjoying is none other than The New Mutants.
The New Mutants's history is almost as ornately screwed-up as 2020's ceaseless dumpster fire of events. Originally slated for an early 2018 release, reshoots pushed the film to early 2019 and then late 2019 as the reshoots were delayed and ultimately not completed. After that, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox, which held almost all of the X-Men movie rights, adding even more confusion to the pile. Fans wondered whether New Mutants was going to be the X-Men's formal entry to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the studios clarified that it was not, and gave The New Mutants another release date: March 2020.
Then the pandemic struck. Of course, coronavirus wreaked havoc for the entertainment industry, and for The New Mutants, it meant being pushed back one last time to August in the hopes that theaters would be open and operating safely enough to entice audiences to see it by then. When it came out, though, the movie hardly made a blip on the radar. Viewers didn't show up because of COVID-19 restrictions and The New Mutants was reduced to an unfortunate asterisk in the history of Fox's X-Men franchise.
In Reynolds' ad, Satan, who resembles the fantastical version from Ridley Scott's cult film Legend, seems to get quite a kick out of The New Mutants. And its noisy action sequences give him the opportunity to enact the classic first movie date move of stretching his arm out and draping it over the shoulder of his date.
Reynolds has built a successful career around the self-aware humor he's become known for through his Deadpool persona, and he's shown how to weaponize it in ways that don't overuse jokes or fall too deeply into the trap of self-deprecating humor. It's a good year for him to use his talents in new ways, and he and his Maximum Effort team have lived up to their potential more than once, including with Match's new ad. With so many stuck at home wishing both Satan and 2020 would lay off a little, the development of their delightful relationship, set to the tune of Taylor Swift's chart-smashing "Love Story," is the kind of rueful laugh everyone needed.