2011 is no secret Green Lantern The film was a disappointment, something that even its star, Ryan Reynolds, maintains to this day. In a recent discussion, Reynolds recalled how bad he felt watching the film for the first time.
Reynolds recently headlined the four-day Just For Laughs comedy festival at the O2 Arena in London, and in a conversation with actor and comedian Rob Delaney, Reynolds reflected on what went wrong for the film . To him, the actor said, it’s a combination of people spending “too much money” and “too much time” on the project, with not enough time spent actually making sure the film works well as a whole .
“Too many people spend too much money and when there’s a problem instead of saying, ‘Okay, let’s stop spending on special effects and let’s think about the character,'” Reynolds said (via Different). “How do we replace this big spectacle thing – which doesn’t work at all – with something character-based?’ and that just never – the thinking was never there to do that,” he explained. “And to their credit, it’s a very old-school way of looking at things. It’s ‘Let’s just keep spending our way through it.’ And that was – it didn’t work. At the same time, there are 185 people that worked on that movie, they all had an amazing time, we loved shooting it. It was really, really fun shooting the movie. But, you know, sitting at that premiere, watching that, oh my God. It’s tough.”
Delaney then asked Reynolds if watching the film for the first time made his “butthole flutter,” to which Reynolds acknowledged that “it was like a ukelele at the bottom,” and not something the actor wanted to repeat. .
“The words are ‘Holy s—’ and ‘No. No!’” Reynolds said of his initial reaction. “Oh my God, it’s like a ukulele on the chin. It’s crazy. It’s a strange feeling. It’s not a feeling I want to repeat. So I really spent the next few years just owning up as much as I could, it was the only way to process it.”
When Green Lantern released in 2011, the film was immediately panned by both critics and audiences. Although the film made a profit based on its $200 million budget, mostly mediocre returns at the box office, along with poor response, led to the cancellation of a follow-up film.