2011's Green Lantern became such a notorious critical and commercial flop that nothing was done with the character of Hal Jordan - or the rest of the GL Corps - in live-action until DC Studios announced plans for the upcoming Lanterns HBO series a couple of years ago.
The movie's many problems have been discussed ad nauseam, and director Martin Campbell has previously spoken about why he felt the DC Comics adaptation didn't connect with audiences.
Now, while speaking to Variety about his latest action movie The Cleaner, the filmmaker gets brutally honest about Green Lantern's failings.
“It didn’t do business, I think, for a number of reasons, but the reason I did it was simply I’d never done one before,” he says. “I think quite honestly, if you’re going to do a superhero movie, you have to be in that world a little bit, you know what I mean? You have to be excited by it. You have to have a background where you are part of that world and you’ve been involved in that thing. And I wasn’t.”
Campbell adds that he "read all the comics and so forth," but simply didn't feel that the script was where it needed to be.
"I’m simply saying I don’t think that the script was great. I also felt that Parallax, our bad guy, was just a cloud with a face on it — literally, that’s all it was. And also you had Ryan [Reynolds] and you had Blake [Lively] who were, by the way, wonderful to work with — I have to say, both terrific. [But] I think while all the characters were part of the story … part of the comics basically, I think the story was left wanting.”
Finally, Campbell says that the film’s original ending was compromised by cost concerns. “I had a totally different ending to the movie, or the last third of it, all of which was scrapped in the interest of budget.”
Plenty of maligned superhero movies have at least a few fans that are willing to go to bat for them, but you'd probably be hard pushed to find anyone rushing to the defence of Green Lantern!
Sworn to preserve intergalactic order, the Green Lantern Corps has existed for centuries. Its newest recruit, Hal Jordan, is the first human to join the ranks. The Green Lanterns have little regard for humans, who have thus far been unable to harness the powers of the ring each member wears. But Jordan, a gifted and cocky test pilot, may be the corps' only hope when a new enemy called Parallax threatens the universal balance of power.