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Was Green Lantern always doomed to fail? Director Martin Campbell gives his post-mortem on the biggest mark on Ryan Reynolds’ career.
Everything was aligned for Green Lantern to be the biggest hit of the year. DC was back on top as Christopher Nolan was wrist deep working on his sequel to the beloved film The Dark Knight. The film wrangled Martin Campbell as the director, who was fresh off the James Bond franchise with Casino Royale. This not to mention the star-studded cast, from Hollywood heart throb Ryan Reynolds to tour de force Angela Bassett. It seemed as though nothing could go wrong.
Then it all went very, very wrong. The film was an absolute flop, ruining the image of Green Lantern, and DC as a whole, in the eyes of the public. Ryan Reynolds is still the butt of jokes about the film to this day. Yet it seems the project wasn’t always doomed to fail. When speaking on the infamous disaster, director Martin Campbell reveals that he thinks the project had the potential to be something special…if only Reynolds had written the script!
“Look, Ryan’s terrific. We actually had a very good time making the movie,” Campbell told ComicBook.com in a recent interview. “It was a tough one to make, and he and Blake Lively were great to work with. He’s always such a witty guy, you know — I think I said this to another writer — I wish he’d written the script! I think he would have done a great job.”
How Martin Campbell Would’ve Fixed Green Lantern
Enough ink has been spilled about the failure of Green Lantern to blot out the last lights of Oa. Martin Campbell himself decided to add a few wells himself in the same chat when reflecting about what he wishes he did differently on the project. The director thinks that the problem wasn’t Ryan Reynolds, but rather tying all of the elements surrounding his character together into one digestible package for audiences.
“After all, Parallax was really a cloud with a face on it, right? You sort of somehow want that character to be related to the villain of the piece, you know,” Campbell explained. “They should all interconnect somehow, and it didn’t in the script, but all the characters are very present in the comics — Sinestro, Kilowog, all the… But, at the end of the day, it failed, which I was very sad about, but there you go. That’s life.”
Given how vast the world of Green Lantern is, it’s understandable that Martin Campbell and the script’s four writers wouldn’t be able to connect them all together effectively. While the film may be a point of pain for the director, at the very least Ryan Reynolds is taking the film in stride, making a joke about it in almost every project he’s involved in. In some ways, it may be better to live on in infamy than fade to nothingness.
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