Director Martin Campbell Knows Exactly Why His ‘Green Lantern’ Bombed: The Villain

When Warner Bros. and DC announced that Ryan Reynolds would be starring as Hal Jordan in the big budget adaptation of Green Lantern, with Goldeneye and Casino Royale director Martin Campbell helming, there was a lot to be excited about. However, the resulting film is considered one of the worst of the genre and was a bomb at the global box office when it opened in 2011, earning $237 million against a $200 million production budget.

Speaking with Variety ahead of his next film Cleaner, Campbell opened up about all the reasons why his Green Lantern movie was so awful. It all comes down to enthusiasm for a project, in this case a comic book adaptation. As he explained:

“I’d never done one before. 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.”

To be fair, Campbell did his proper research, reading the legendary runs of the comic book series, but still, the film was terrible. Campbell also said that the script wasn’t great, taking the blame for the failure. It also didn’t help that Reynolds’ Green Lantern suit was CGI instead of actually being a costume. The actor got meta in Deadpool by saying, “Please don’t make the super suit green… or animated!“

And the director also said that the villain left a lot to be desired:

“I also felt that Parallax, our bad guy, was just a cloud with a face on it — literally, that’s all it was.”

In the comic book, the original Green Lantern Hal Jordan becomes the villain Parallax, while the then-new GL Kyle Rayner must fight him. Currently, the film has a terrible 25% critical and 45% audience rating. A subsequent sequel was scrapped and a year later, Christopher Nolan wrapped up his legendary Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Also Had a Villain That Was a Cloud With a Face

Parallax wasn’t the only cloud bad guy in a big budget superhero film. In the 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, while arguably a little better than the first, the production team really dropped the ball with Galactus. While the Silver Surfer, played by the terrific Doug Jones (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), was fairly comic book accurate, Galactus is a whole different story. As the “Devourer of Worlds” approaches Earth, audiences see he is not the giant man in purple, but a cloud with a face. Thankfully, the MCU version, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, ensures that fans are getting an authentic Galactus, as teased in the movie’s first trailer.

Meanwhile, in James Gunn’s upcoming Superman, fans are being treated to an authentic Guy Gardner, the “bad boy” of the Green Lantern Corp., and played by the always terrific Nathan Fillion (Castle, Firefly). Gunn and his team are also working on the Lanterns TV series, which will star Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre (The Underground Railroad) as John Stewart.