Green Lantern director Martin Campbell reveals his original ending for the 2011 superhero that Warner Bros. cut due to budget reasons. Martin Campbell has a long-running career as one of the top action directors in Hollywood, having relaunched the James Bond franchise twice with GoldenEye in 1995 and Casino Royale in 2006. His 1998 film The Mask of Zorro is a fan favorite and he is currently promoting his latest film The Protégé starring Maggie Q, Michael Keaton, and Samuel L. Jackson. In 2011, he seemed like the perfect director for a superhero movie and he got his chance with Green Lantern.
However, Green Lantern was not the box-office hit that Warner Bros. hoped for. It did debut at number 1 at the box office but came in below expectations with an opening of $53.2 million on a budget of $200 million. The film grossed $116.6 million at the domestic box office and came in below the other 2011 summer superhero movies like X-Men: First Class, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger. Since the film's release, many involved have been critical of it, from star Ryan Reynolds, who has taken many jabs at the picture in the Deadpool films, to Martin Campbell saying he regrets making it.
In an interview with Collider, Martin Campbell revealed his original plan for the ending of Green Lantern. Campbell envisioned a massive fight with the villainous Parallax against not just Hal Jordan's Green Lantern, but also Sinestro, Kilowog, and Tomar-Re and likened it to The Magnificent Seven. Warner Bros. decided to cut the ending down due to budgetary reasons. Campbell said:
“The problem was I remember in the last six to eight weeks of pre-production, every day—and I mean every day, we had meetings about cutting the budget. ‘We need to cut the budget. How are we going to cut the budget.’ Every goddamn day. And I’d worked out a terrific ending for that movie. I remember I had this quite big office down in New Orleans, the production offices, and I plastered the walls with storyboards. It was like wallpaper everywhere for the ending of the movie, and they came in and said, ‘We can’t afford it. You have to cut it all.’ So in the end they came up with that crap ending…To be honest, there was a battle in the streets between the four lanterns—between our heroes, Kilowog, Sinestro, and obviously Ryan Reynolds, and blah-blah—taking on a huge kind of monster that was taking over the city, and it was really The Magnificent Seven in a way, or The Magnificent Four. However, it did not come to pass, so there we are.”
The ending in the finished film has Hal Jordan facing off against Parallax alone, and once he defeats the creature he is saved from falling into the sun by the three Green Lanterns arriving on the scene once the battle is over. The ending that Campbell had planned out sounds very much like the climax to The Avengers, which Green Lantern could have done first by 11 months. Much of the marketing for Green Lantern teased a massive sci-fi epic with a large cast of Green Lantern Corps members, and it appears that was Campbell's original idea but Warner Bros. got cold feet.
In the ten years since Green Lantern hit theaters, it is only now that it appears Warner Bros. is giving the property the attention it needed. Green Lantern was not featured in Justice League, despite a Green Lantern member being a founding member of every incarnation of the team, and a Green Lantern's inclusion was even vetoed by Warner Bros. when Zack Snyder wanted to include one in his recent cut of Justice League. HBO Max is developing a Green Lantern series that will focus on Lantern members like Alan Scott, Guy Gardner, Jessica Cruz, and Simon Baz, while Stargirl recently introduced Jade, the daughter of Alan Scott into the series. Hopefully, Warner Bros. has learned from what went wrong the first time, and future Green Lantern projects won't be hamstrung by the same problems.
Source: Collider
