Green Lantern Director Reveals the DC Movie’s One Success

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Green Lantern director Martin Campbell has reflected on his critically maligned DC outing and has celebrated the film’s one true success. Green Lantern stars Ryan Reynolds as the test pilot Hal Jordan, who is selected to become a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. Based on a script by Arrowverse mastermind Greg Berlanti and comic book writers Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim, the finished screenplay was later rewritten by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix scribe Michael Goldenberg.

 

Taking almost 14 years to develop, high expectations for the film were ultimately let down, with audiences criticizing the film’s writing, poor use of CGI, and departures from the original comic source material. Since its 2011 release, even Reynolds himself has constantly heaped scorn upon the film, even famously making Green Lantern jokes in his two Deadpool outings. Currently, the film holds a dismal 26% critical score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and is noted as being "noisy, overproduced, and thinly written." Bringing in just under $220 million in worldwide box office, it's estimated the film was responsible for a box office loss of up to $75 million.

 

After a decade of receiving little but scorn from critics, audiences, and even the film’s own stars, Campbell has spoken with Screen Rant about one positive to come out of the film. Campbell, whose latest action-thriller film Memory stars Liam Neeson, was reminded that Green Lantern was responsible for introducing Reynolds to his future wife Blake Lively. Check out his full response below:

Well, I did! That, of course, is the success of that movie.

 

By the way, both terrific people, honestly. Blake's hilarious. She used to cook little cakes for us every morning on set. She'd bake them herself and bring them onto the set, and Ryan was a terrific guy as well.

 

Reynolds and Lively would eventually go on to marry in September 2012, and the pair currently have three daughters together. While Green Lantern ultimately failed to achieve what Warner Bros. hoped it would, with the studio later scrapping plans for a planned sequel in response to fan backlash, it is great that such a positive still managed to rise from the wreckage of the film. Far from being a major career misstep, the production ultimately brought two of its stars together to become one of Hollywood’s favorite couples.

The future of the Green Lantern franchise is also far from being crippled by the legacy of the 2011 flop. While plans for the big screen Green Lantern Corps film set within the DCEU have been stagnating since 2015, Berlanti is producing a HBO Max Green Lantern series, which will focus on the Guy Gardner, Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz, and Alan Scott versions of the character. With these facts in mind, perhaps 2011’s Green Lantern film is not as big a failure as some would like to believe.

 

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