Green Lantern 2: Why Ryan Reynolds never returned for a Sequel  

It is safe to say that Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern is a film that everyone involved with it would like to forget about. Following MCU’s success, DC’s Green Lantern was supposed to start its own cinematic universe. However, that didn’t happen as WB chose to start it with Man of Steel instead.

But what happened to the original plans for Green Lantern 2? Why did Warner Bros. never go through with the sequel? After all, they had set it up with the perfect post-credits scene of Sinestro wearing the yellow ring. So, even if Green Lantern had a rocky start, they could have fixed things with a sequel, however that didn’t happen because of multiple reasons.

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The box office failures of Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern

Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern (Image via DC)

Green Lantern was produced on a massive budget of $200 million, which is already a huge number. But upon watching the film, one could see why the production cost was so high. Every Green Lantern in the film wore a CGI suit, and many of them were alien Lanterns that were completely created with CGI. Even the villain Parallax was computer generated.

So naturally, the film was always going to be expensive. But on top of the production budget, Warner Bros. reportedly spent around $175 million on marketing. So, to recover that cost, Green Lantern needed to make at least $700 million to turn in a profit. But it ended up grossing just $219 million worldwide.

Out of its total intake, WB would have made a revenue of around $120 million, and the rest would have gone to the theater chains. Another $45 million was added to the total revenue through Home Video sales. So, the total revenue only came to around $165 million. Ultimately, Warner Bros. lost around $200 million on the movie and that basically killed the brand and any future plans related to it.

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The critical verdict

Green Lantern’s Rotten Tomatoes score (Image via Rotten Tomatoes)

The box office aspect alone would be enough to cancel any sequel plans. But the second reason we never got Green Lantern 2 was because of bad reviews. It wasn’t just fans who hated the film; the critics called it a colossal failure as the movie only got a 26% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

It wasn’t a scenario where the critics loved the film while the fans didn’t know about it. With the kind of money that Warner Bros. spent on advertising the movie, everyone should have heard of it. The critics might have saved the sequel by giving the original some good reviews. But with such a low RT score, nobody could have done anything because the film wasn’t received well by anyone.

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Even lead actor Ryan Reynolds hated the movie

Deadpool 2's post-credits scene featuring Ryan Reynolds (Image via 20th Century Studios)

Reynolds has been very vocal about disliking Green Lantern. He wasn’t pleased with wearing a motion capture suit during the entire production. He along with the entire fandom thought that it wasn’t the greatest idea to make the Green Lantern suit completely CGI. Even the mask was created with VFX, which felt fake throughout the film.

Reynolds further went on to make fun of Green Lantern in both of his Deadpool movies and those jokes have not ended to this date. Back in 2011, he was a rising star looking to establish himself as a Hollywood A-Lister and with the success of Green Lantern, he would have become unstoppable. But unfortunately for him, the movie bombed.

Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson and Green Lantern (Image via DC)

Ryan Reynolds became an actor who had a hot streak of superhero flops. First, Blade: Trinity bombed in 2005. Then X-Men: Origins Wolverine ruined him by covering his mouth. Finally, Green Lantern flopped and created a lot of problems for Reynolds’ career. So naturally, the actor isn’t fond of the film at all.

Luckily for him, he was able to turn things around with Deadpool and then never looked back. But the Green Lantern franchise didn’t share the same fate as Warner Bros. has still not been able to reuse the character properly in live action. But reportedly, we are about to get a Lanterns series on HBO Max in the next three years.