Ryan Reynolds' love for iconic '90s divas is well-known, with Deadpool 2 unexpectedly featuring a power ballad by Celine Dion. Now, the trailers for Reynold's upcoming Free Guy have confirmed that the movie heavily features Mariah Carey's mega-hit 1995 song Fantasy. In an interview with CinemaBlend, Free Guy director Shawn Levy explained how the inclusion of Fantasy into 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 to Mariah in 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 Guy tells the story of a video 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, Fantasy has 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 of video-game movie adaptations in Hollywood, Free Guy departs 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 Guy is similar to Wreck-It Ralph, and Ryan Reynolds has 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 Guy features 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 from Cinemablend.