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DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond

JD said:
I enjoyed the GL movie, but I think my biggest issue was that it just tried to introduce too much too quickly, trying to do Hal's origin story with the whole GL Corps, Hammond, and Parallax all at once. I think starting smaller, and then working their way up to bigger things, like the whole GL Corps, and Parallax would have been a better idea.
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I agree with this. It was also not very good at establishing Hal as a hero, having him absent for much of the villains' deadly attacks and only showing up late to save one or two people.

But I feel that the biggest problem Green Lantern had was the ill fortune of being released in the same year as Thor, Captain America, and X-Men: First Class. It paled in comparison to those, but I think that if it had come out, say, 5-6 years earlier, compared against the likes of Elektra, Fantastic Four, Superman Returns, and X-Men: The Last Stand, it would've been considered relatively good.
 
Putting off Sinestro as the big bad was a sin. Parallax was a ridiculous threat, squarely in don't care territory, with the threat and solution primarily a VFX light show. But a betrayal by a character who felt betrayed and confronting them would have made the stakes personal, with greater potential to work better as a dramatic and engaging story.
 
The Green Lantern animated movie with Stabler was better than the Reynolds one in pretty much every way.
Except on a scale of how live-actiony they are. That's the one area where the Reynolds one wins. Oh, and "amount of Taika Waititi" too, I guess.
 
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I have Green Lantern on DVD and watch it periodically, so obviously I don't hate it.

I agree with @JD that they went too big, too soon. I would have preferred something more on the scale of Spiderman (2002) where it was more down to earth, personal, and Hal was learning about this power he suddenly had and learning to make that fit in with his personal life. Jumping right in to cosmic troubles was too much too soon. Introduce Sinestro the hypothetical next film; make us care about Hal and relate to him on an Earthly level in the first.

A lot was made of the CGI suit at the time, but hell, it's a ring-conjured suit, it shouldn't look like spandex or dyed-green denim. Meaning to say, I think a lot of fans jumped on pretty insignificant details because the main focus of the plot got out of hand and we couldn't get into the story without having a hero we cared about.

Hell, this was Ryan Reynolds. I think it's fair to say after all we've seen him in that if the movie flopped it was nothing to do with Hal/Green Lantern, it was the story. Not meaning to imply anyone here is arguing otherwise, but looking at it that way helps me to focus on what it was that didn't work.

The movie needed more focus on Hal and what he was going through so we could relate, be sympathetic, and imagine going on a ride with the ring. This is how I felt with Spiderman and other films that really worked for me.
 
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Saul said:
He was kinda wasted in this the way he was wasted in 'X-Men Origins Wolverine'. Whether he was miscast or not he didn't have much space to do the thing that audiences like about him.
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The part seemed to be written for Reynold's usual screen persona, which wasn't a good match for Hal Jordan.
 
I liked Reynolds fine in it. Then again, I have little knowledge of or interest in Green Lantern, so I didn't bring much in the way of expectations to it. I thought the movie was pretty entertaining. Lively was great.
 
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) said:
The part seemed to be written for Reynold's usual screen persona, which wasn't a good match for Hal Jordan.
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That's not a dealbreaker by itself. Grant Gustin's Barry Allen doesn't bear much resemblance to the comics version, nor did Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker. The goal of an adaptation is not to copy the source, it's to tell a good story in its own right using the source as raw material. Heck, comics are read by at most tens of thousands of people while big-budget movies are seen by tens or hundreds of millions of people, so it's a given that most of the audience for a superhero movie will be unfamiliar with the comics version anyway. So what makes a movie succeed or fail isn't whether it's consistent with the source, just whether it works well in itself. Green Lantern's version of Hal Jordan just didn't work very well as a character, regardless of its similarity to the traditional Hal.
 
Tosk said:
The Green Lantern animated movie with Stabler was better than the Reynolds one in pretty much every way.
Except on a scale of how love-actiony they are. That's the one area where the Reynolds one wins. Oh, and "amount of Taika Waititi" too, I guess.
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The problem with the GL Animated movie is that it was more about Sinestro than it was about Hal.
 
suarezguy said:
Do you think Green Lantern could have been a big hit and if so how?
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Good points made by all. I'd say it mostly failed because it didn't give the audience time to get to know and like Hal before throwing the universe at him (literally). So yes, agree on "too big, too soon". And I literally groaned when the stupid yellow cloud showed up.
 
For Green Lantern I just want them to animate the Sinestro Corps War already. Maybe then Blackest Night
 
Those two arcs would work better with proper build up, IMO. One of the things I liked during Geoff Johns' run on GL was the introduction of Soranik Natu and her development into a member of the GLC. I haven't kept up with much since the N52 came out, but from what I've read about some of those arcs I'm not convinced it was the best direction for the writers to take, in terms of Soranik's evolution.
 
TREK_GOD_1 said:
Yes--Jordan was never some happy-go-lucky comedic character, so if you start with bad casting, one could not expect much more from the film.. Then, there was that horrible "script" hammering the final nail in its coffin.
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The casting wasn't the issue with the film; the entire issue was with the script itself.
 
Johns run on Green Lantern from Rebirth through his concluding arc in the New 52 provides a pretty decent and complete Hal Jordan story. My first preference in a GL series would always be to do a version of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow road stories of the 70's--but that will never happen, so adapting any or all of the the stories from the return of Hal to the end of Johns run would be great.
 
theenglish said:
Johns run on Green Lantern from Rebirth through his concluding arc in the New 52 provides a pretty decent and complete Hal Jordan story. My first preference in a GL series would always be to do a version of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow road stories of the 70's--but that will never happen, so adapting any or all of the the stories from the return of Hal to the end of Johns run would be great.
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I dunno, an Earthbound Green Lantern series would be more viable for live-action TV than a space-based one. "Hard-Travelin' Heroes" seems like a good format for such a show -- at least, it would've been back in the '70s or '80s, the heyday of that kind of picaresque town-of-the-week series. (Well, the '60s were its heyday too, but that was before the comics run in question.)
 
I kind of miss that format. And current DC shows look similar in that there is a hero, the supporting team, and their base of operations. I know that there are budget considerations, but this is HBO Max and money should be less of a factor.
 
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