The cinematic world is a big oyster that doesn't give all films the destiny to be huge. Some movies become classics at first sight, while others tend to gain recognition years after release. However, there are also motion pictures that fall flat and tumble right off the bat, including Ryan Reynolds' Green Lantern. Reynolds' featured film is regarded as the movie that should never have been made in the history of DC, probably in the whole superhero genre. But for what reason did Green Lantern become a phenomenal flop?
“There were just too many people spending too much money and when there was a problem rather than say, ‘Okay, let’s stop spending on special effects and let’s think about character. How do we replace this big spectacle thing – that isn’t working at all – with something that’s character based?’ and that just never – the thinking was never there to do that,” he explained to Variety.
Reynolds continued, “And to their credit, it’s a very old-school way of looking at things. It’s just ‘Let’s just keep spending our way through this.’ And that was – it didn’t work. At the same time, 185 people worked on that movie, they all had an amazing time, and we loved shooting it. Truly, shooting the movie was a lot of fun. But, you know, sitting in that premiere, watching that, oh my God. It’s tough.”
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The Free Guy star also recalled the time he attended the premiere of Green Lantern and of course, it’s not the greatest moment of his career. “The words were ‘Holy Sh*t’ and ‘No. NO!’ Oh my God [my butt] was like a ukulele down there. It was crazy. It was an odd feeling. It was not a feeling I wanted to repeat. So I spent the following years just owning as much as I could, it was the only way to kind of process it,” he narrated.
Released in 2011, Green Lantern was based on the DC Comics character of the same name, starring Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, a hotshot test pilot who is inducted into the interstellar Green Lantern Corps police force due to his indomitable will. Despite the failure of the film, DCU is taking another shot at the narrative under James Gunn and Peter Safran's management as they plan to helm a television series slated to introduce a larger mystery for the overarching DCU, Lanterns.
Reynolds’ Deadpool 3 hits theaters on Nov. 8, 2024, while Green Lantern is now streaming on HBO Max.
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