Green Lantern director, Martin Campbell, says he shouldn’t have directed the superhero movie at all. Following his regrettable premiere as Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), 2011’s now-infamous Green Lantern starred Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan—the first human to become a member of the Green Lantern Corps. The cast also included Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Angela Bassett, Tim Robbins, and Taika Waititi.
In a Screen Rant exclusive interview, Martin Campbell talked about directing Green Lantern. When asked about Zack Snyder’s Justice League, David Ayer’s cut of the Suicide Squad, and whether or not there’s a Campbell cut of Green Lantern, the director said he shouldn’t have directed a superhero movie at all. Read what he had to say below:
“No,” said Campbell. “We’ll put it this way: I did have my cut. The point was, right at the beginning of the movie, there was a whole sequence where he’s an 11 year old kid. It’s how his father dies in the air crash, which was a really good sequence. But [the production head] at the time decided that he wanted the death of the father intercut with Hal plunging in the plane, and he saw these flashbacks come to him. That was something that I didn’t like very much. “But you know what? The film did not work, really. That’s the point, and I’m partly responsible for that. I shouldn’t have done it. Because with something like Bond – I love Bond, and I watched every Bond film before I ever directed it. Superhero movies are not my cup of tea, and for that reason, I shouldn’t have done it. But directors always have to carry the can for the failures. What do they say? Success has many fathers, failure has one. And that’s me.”
It’s certainly reasonable to assume Green Lantern suffered from studio interference similar to Suicide Squad (2016) and Justice League (2017). Reynolds has accused the studio of rushing to make the film without a completed script to meet release dates and adhere to a cool poster. It’s clear that the studio made mistakes during the production of Green Lantern and, given Campbell’s comments, he probably wasn’t in a position to save the project. It’s worth mentioning that worse comic book movies have been made—Catwoman (2004), Jonah Hex (2010), and Fantastic Four (2015)—to name a few. After finally watching the film this year, Reynolds even said it wasn’t as bad as he thought it was.
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