‘Deadpool’ has highest grossing R-rated opening of all time

It’s one of those rare, too-good-to-be-true type deals that actually gets more impressive when you read the fine print.

“Deadpool” is a comic book movie about a vaguely amoral and definitively insane mercenary who is hideously scarred and has a bad habit of skewering people with katana swords and breaking the fourth wall with parenthetical asides. As result he is neither a regular feature on lunchboxes nor a much sought after dinner guest.

The movie was not only the highest grossing R-rated opening of all time, but the biggest premiere weekend in the history of Twentieth Century Fox Studios.

To put that even further into perspective, it has made more money in its first four days in theaters than Reynolds’ last five films combined did over the span of their collective lifetimes.

It is, to use a technical insider term, absolutely bananas.

There will be an immediate knee-jerk reaction on the part of critics, analysts and studio heads to break down whatever natural alchemy occurred between director Tim Miller, screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and their cast so that it can be re-created later under controlled circumstances in a laboratory setting.

William Goldman is an acclaimed screenwriter who is as equally famous for his proclamation that nobody in Hollywood knows anything as for his work on movies like “The Princess Bride.”

If Goldman is right and trying to prepackage a hit really is an exercise in utter futility at least it’s not an entirely incomprehensible one.

Remember that the folks giving the green light are gambling with multimillion-dollar budgets — investments really — and they are looking for any guarantees they can get in front of or behind the camera.

“Deadpool” was budgeted at a cool $58 million. By comparison, “X-Men,” Fox’s first foray into the superhero genre in 2000, was budgeted at an estimated $75 million. By the time the property had evolved into a full-fledged franchise, the fifth installment (not counting spinoffs) was thought to have cost nearly $200 million.

Whether “Deadpool 2” ends up costing more than $100 million, there’s something vaguely uncomfortable about the prospect of a sword-wielding, borderline psychotic in a red suit becoming a safe bet — especially when the danger is half the fun.