UPDATE 9/3: The 2011 movie’s own concept artist has been sharing his Hal Jordan designs — Reynolds in a practical green-and-black suit, drawn straight from the comics — along with Kilowog and Tomar-Re art from the canceled Green Lantern space series.
For fifteen years, Green Lantern has been Hollywood’s favorite punchline.
Nobody has told the joke harder than Ryan Reynolds himself. Deadpool 2‘s post-credits scene literally shoots pre-Green Lantern Reynolds in the head before he can sign on, and Reynolds has spent a decade treating the 2011 movie as the embarrassing ex he can’t stop roasting.
Well, after Lanterns Episode 3, it’s time to say it out loud.
We owe the man an apology.
Yes, the movie bombed
The numbers were ugly, and they’re not up for debate.
Green Lantern opened to $53.1 million in June 2011 and limped to $237.2 million worldwide against a $200 million production budget, before marketing.
It sits at 25% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, next to a 45% audience score.
Warner Bros. killed the sequel, shelved the character, and the movie became shorthand for everything wrong with DC on the big screen.
The CG suit was said to be a mistake (where’d we kill for it now). Parallax was a flying smoke cloud. The studio recut it to death.
The 2011 movie actually respected Green Lantern
Go back and watch it after tonight’s episode of Lanterns, and something jumps out immediately: the movie believed in the source material.
Oa is an actual alien world; glowing, cosmic, rendered with real money.
The Green Lantern Corps is thousands of aliens standing shoulder to shoulder. Kilowog is voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan. Tomar-Re is Geoffrey Rush. Mark Strong’s Sinestro is so good that fans spent years asking for a sequel just to see the heel turn in the post-credits scene that was promised.
Hal Jordan is a cocky test pilot who flies actual jets, recites the actual oath, and builds actual constructs, including the racetrack, the giant fist, the gatling gun.
The Guardians, the rings, the fear entity, the training on Oa, and the mythology are all up there on the big screen.
The execution missed. The ambition didn’t.
And Reynolds was never the problem. He played comic book Hal Jordan straight down the middle and got buried under a bad script and worse CGI.
Then HBO gave Oa a food court
Fifteen years later, with prestige-TV money and technology the 2011 crew could only dream about, HBO’s Lanterns delivers: Oa as an abandoned shopping mall.
A Guardian of the Universe played by Laura Linney wandering around Earth as a human.
Hal Jordan flying like a normal guy being yanked off the ground, with no green aura, no spectacle.
A mythology rewritten so the Guardians run job interviews on mattress piles, with cosmic adventure swapped out for the race lectures that just set the fanbase on fire.
As laid out in our Episode 3 review, this is one of the most visually imaginative corners of DC Comics reduced to a dead shopping mall.
Even Grant Morrison said Kyle Chandler is playing Doctor McCoy, not Hal Jordan.
And don’t skip the inversion here: in 2011, critics trashed Green Lantern while audiences came in 20 points kinder.
In 2026, critics are applauding Lanterns while the fanbase revolts.
The people this material was made for keep landing on the opposite side of the people reviewing it.
Sorry, Ryan
Reynolds spent a decade apologizing for Green Lantern, turning it into a running gag everywhere from talk shows to the Deadpool movies.
He never owed us that.
His Green Lantern swung at the comics and missed.
HBO’s Lanterns won’t even swing. Only one of those is forgivable.
The movie tried to make Green Lantern the biggest thing in the universe. The show seems embarrassed it has to be about Green Lantern at all.
And say this much for the 2011 version: at least Hal Jordan walks out of it alive.
