Spencer Pratt ripped Ryan Reynolds after the “Deadpool” star soured on America’s rose-colored view of the 1980s, calling him a “tool” and accusing Hollywood figures of making “every normal American hate them.”
The feud began after Reynolds, 49, discussed Apple TV’s “Mayday” with Variety. In the film, he plays a US Navy pilot whose plotline brings him into the orbit of Kenneth Branagh as a strange former KGB agent obsessed with 1980s American pop culture.
“What’s interesting is when you get far enough away from a time period that’s distinct, there’s always a lovely feeling associated with it,” Reynolds told Variety.
“It’s almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream,” he added.
It makes perfect sense that Ryan Reynolds' view of the 80's is the inverse of what normal people think. In 80's movies, bad guys were villains. Today, the bad guys are the heroes. Hollywood now bends over backwards to redeem wickedness and mental illness.
Top Gun and St Thomas… https://t.co/nResuc7we7 pic.twitter.com/W1lQcye64h
— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) September 4, 2026
Born in 1976, Reynolds delivered the downbeat retro take Tuesday night at AMC Lincoln Square in New York City, saying the decade’s pop-culture shine hides the chaos underneath.
“The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife,” Reynolds said.
“Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before.”
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He argued that the era has since been boiled down to a few loud cultural symbols.
“It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. Top Gun. Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
Pratt, whose June run for Los Angeles mayor fell short at the ballot box, seized on the remarks in an X post aimed at Reynolds.
“Here I am trying to bring back American film jobs, and then these tools keep saying stupid crap like this and making every normal American hate them,” Pratt wrote.
“Hollywood is seriously its own worst enemy. Just stick to the Cricket wireless ads, dude.”
Reynolds previously owned 25 percent of Mint Mobile before T-Mobile purchased it, and he appears in ads for the wireless company.
The actor also pushed his nostalgia point into the present, saying people may eventually remember 2026 through the “big ticket items that didn’t really leave the footprint, culturally, that we thought it would’ve.”
Reynolds described the 2000s as feeling assembled from earlier eras, while prior decades had more recognizable identities. He also predicted the “COVID era” may one day get a softer treatment in memory.
“We’re living in the frickin’ salad days. We just don’t know it,” he said.
Pratt’s jab at Reynolds followed his own political detour in Los Angeles, which came after the home he shared with wife Heidi Montag was destroyed in the city’s fires.
Their house was one of thousands wiped out in what was described as the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history.
Pratt launched his mayoral plan on the one-year anniversary of the fires, citing anger over the government’s handling of the disaster.
After Pratt lost, President Trump criticized the Los Angeles mayoral primary on Truth Social.
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” Trump wrote.
Reynolds was not the only Marvel name caught in a celebrity skirmish this week.
Fellow fictional superhero Andrew Garfield, who starred in “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” before reappearing in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” again stood by his long-held view that Spider-Man does not have to be straight.
Garfield, 43, revisited the idea while promoting “The Uprising,” Entertainment Weekly reported, more than a decade after he first raised it publicly in 2013.
“It was an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” Garfield told the outlet.
“I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit. That’s the point of why it’s such a kind of universally beloved character, one of the greatly beloved characters in the history of fiction is because you don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality. Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”
Garfield framed the idea as a way to let more viewers imagine themselves behind the mask.
“I like the idea of a place where everyone is being honored and everyone is being included, and it was just a kind of act of saying, ‘Well, why not?’ And you’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way,” he said.
In 2013, Garfield had floated a version of Peter Parker’s Mary Jane romance that would turn the love interest into a man.
“I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ. … I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’” Garfield said at the time. “Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking! … So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?”
Garfield said Michael B. Jordan would have been his pick for the part, calling him “so charismatic and talented” and adding, “It’d be even better — we’d have interracial bisexuality!”
Tom Holland fronted the latest Spider-Man movie, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which broke box-office records over the summer and cleared $2 billion.
Jane Fonda swung into Paramount’s battle with Marvel superhero Mark Ruffalo, after the studio accused the “Hulk” star of invoking “antisemitic tropes” while opposing the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery-Paramount merger.
At Diane von Furstenberg’s DVF Awards on Thursday, Fonda defended Ruffalo and singled out Larry Ellison during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Larry Ellison, because he doesn’t like Mark Ruffalo’s position on the merger, accuses him of antisemitism when he said nothing that isn’t within his constitutional right to say,” Fonda said.
“It’s a tactic they’re using. He should be ashamed of himself, Larry Ellison. But there’s a lot of support for Mark. A lot of people came forward.”
Paramount’s accusation stemmed from Ruffalo reposting an August video in which Safra Catz, Oracle’s executive vice chair and a Paramount board member, discussed Oracle technology provided to Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks.
Ruffalo pointed to Larry Ellison’s financial link to the proposed acquisition and warned that the merger could advance “oppression.”
By Tuesday, more than 180 Jewish entertainers and artists had signed a letter supporting Ruffalo “proudly” over the accusation.