For fans of the DC TV series, Arrow, The Flash, DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow and Supergirl, you may have been left scratching your head wondering why those shows are so good while the Green Lantern movie was a failure.
Greg Berlanti is the showrunner of the DC TV series (and might direct the Booster Gold movie) and is credited as a writer and producer on the Green Lantern movie.
So what happened?
Berlanti offers to THR that he is not to blame for Green Lantern as he didn’t have much to do with the final version of the film. Berlanti’s script wasn’t used, and he says he basically had to just go to the set and watch them ruin the movie as he was “fired.”
I’ve had a lot of stuff not work on TV, too. I’ve had as much failure in this business as I’ve had success, across both spectrums. We can count pillows! (Laughs.) But Green Lantern is a great one to point to. I got fired from that movie as a writer and as a director, and yet my name was all over it. I still get blamed for it, even though I had nothing to do with the finished product. As Marc Guggenheim always says, there’s a very Google-able script that we did write that was not executed that I still stand by. But at the time, I thought, “Oh God, that noose will hang around my neck my whole life.”
My only request [when we started on Arrow] was to let us do it our way because I was so heartbroken by what had happened. Being a part of something like that when you’ve loved those characters your whole life, and thinking you’re not going to really get a chance to participate before you even start was very [tough]. Having to go every day to see whatever version of the film that they’d concocted at that point was a bit like having to buckle in and go drive to the same auto accident every day and get hit by the same car.
The 2011 Green Lantern movie finished with a worldwide gross of $219 million, with $116.6 million of that from the U.S. It’s opening U.S. weekend saw over $53 million.
WB is currently rebooting Green Lantern in their new Justice League movie universe. The Green Lantern Corps movie has a 2020 release date.
