Before he became Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds starred in the failed DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. film Green Lantern in 2011, a movie Ryan Reynolds recently admitted he has never seen. Years before the wildly successful Deadpool film, Green Lantern posted catastrophic numbers by earning only $219.8 millon worldwide with a production budget of $200 million.
Now, the future of Green Lantern in the DCEU is very uncertain. A Green Lantern Corps movie was announced in 2014 to be released in July 2020, but there is nothing attached to the film, and with so many other films being shifted around in the DCEU, the future for this one looks grim. Ryan Reynolds had this to say about his film:
“I’ve got to be really careful how I answer this. Look, I’ve never seen the full final version of Green Lantern. I saw a very late stage rough cut of the film. Now, that isn’t to say that I didn’t want to see it because I didn’t like it. I have movies that have been received pretty well that I haven’t seen, and then I have movies that I have seen 100 times that people don’t like but I just like. The Green Lantern [joke in Deadpool] to me is just sort of, I don’t know, kind of fun. It’s me just taking the piss out of me, but it’s more Wade [Wilson] though.”
There are many actors who have not seen some of their own movies, and it doesn’t seem like this is too unusual for Reynolds himself. It is rather strange that he attended Green Lantern’s premier in Los Angeles and hasn’t explained why he didn’t stick around for the screening, but he is certainly aware of how the movie was received by the fans thanks to jokes seen in Deadpool.
Either way, while Green Lantern didn’t work for Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool sure did, and hopefully someone else can take on the helm of Hal Jordan and give the Green Lantern Corps. a shot at redemption.
