The movie Ryan Reynolds knew was doomed from the start: “It was an odd feeling”
It must be great to be Ryan Reynolds.
Not only are you a handsome movie star with tons of money, a successful football team, and a Canadian passport, but you’ve also got some absolute crackers under your belt. Buried, The Proposal, the Deadpool series, those are some seriously impressive titles. Unfortunately for the alliterative A-lister, it hasn’t always been so good.
Mr Blake Lively has made some seriously shoddy films in his time. There’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in which he played a horribly bastardised version of the character that would one day make him famous. There’s the subpar thriller Selfless, which even Reynolds himself has admitted was a mistake. Then there’s quite possibly his biggest sin, one of the worst superhero films ever committed to celluloid: 2011’s Green Lantern.
Starring Reynolds as Hal Jordan, this take on one of DC’s strongest characters left a foul stench in the eyes, ears, and other collective orifices of everyone who saw it. Its star has been very vocal about bashing it in public, including in a 2023 interview with The Independent. He shared his thoughts about the movie upon seeing it for the first time, but not before he tried to salvage something positive from the experience.
“There are 185 people that worked on that movie, they all had an amazing time, we loved shooting it. Truly, shooting the movie was a lot of fun,” he said, “But, you know, sitting in that premiere, watching that… Oh my God, it’s tough… It was crazy. It was an odd feeling. It was not a feeling I wanted to repeat. So I really spent the following years just owning as much as I could; it was the only way to kind of process it.”
When asked about why he thought the movie was such a disaster, Reynolds blamed a behind-the-scenes culture that was driven by money. “There was just too many people spending too much money and when there was a problem rather than say, ‘OK, let’s stop spending on special effects and let’s think about character’,” he explained, adding, “The thinking was never there to do that…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.”
Unfortunately for those 185 people (and Reynolds himself), Green Lantern turned out to be way worse than anybody could have imagined. It was brutalised by critics, who at this point were used to high-quality superhero fare from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What’s more, Warner Bros failed to recoup the $200million they spent on the wretched thing, marking the entire project one giant waste of time. Plans for more DC movies were scrapped and later reworked into the DCEU, which went so much better, and Reynolds’ career slumped to its absolute nadir. At least he met his wife on the project; silver linings and all that.
People are shaped by their failures just as much as their successes, and while Reynolds has spoken many times about how he’d love to neuralise Green Lantern from history, Men in Black style, he wouldn’t have had the career he has today without it. So does that mean we should be grateful that this film exists? No, that would be a leap too giant for mankind.
