‘Green Lantern’ Director Martin Campbell on Why the Superhero Film Flopped: ‘Our Bad Guy Was Just a Cloud With a Face on It’

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/green-lantern-martin-campbell-superhero-film-flop-1236313309/

23 comments

  1. >“It didn’t do business, I think, for a number of reasons, but the reason I did it was simply I’d never done one before,” he says. “I think quite honestly, if you’re going to do a superhero movie, you have to be in that world a little bit, you know what I mean? You have to be excited by it. You have to have a background where you are part of that world and you’ve been involved in that thing. And I wasn’t.”

    >Touching on the film in past interviews, Campbell had previously described himself as “the wrong director” for the film. But he emphasized that that epiphany was one he didn’t have until afterward. “I read all the comics and so forth. All the characters are true to the comics, if you see what I mean,” he says. Even so, he suggests that the script he was working from didn’t help. “I’m not blaming it on that. I’m simply saying I don’t think that the script was great. I also felt that Parallax, our bad guy, was just a cloud with a face on it — literally, that’s all it was.”

    >“And also you had Ryan [Reynolds] and you had Blake [Lively] who were, by the way, wonderful to work with — I have to say, both terrific,” he adds. “[But] I think while all the characters were part of the story … part of the comics basically, I think the story was left wanting.” Campbell also says that the film’s ending was compromised by cost concerns. “I had a totally different ending to the movie, or the last third of it, all of which was scrapped in the interest of budget,” he recalls.

    >Despite those obstacles, Campbell recognizes that responsibility for the failure of “Green Lantern” falls upon him — and he accepts that. “Listen, I’m not making any excuses,” he insists. “When you direct and people don’t like it, you suck it up and you say, ‘Well, I’m the director, so that’s my fault’.

    >“I mean, the point was that I made that film simply because I hadn’t done a superhero movie before and the film failed, as simple as that.”

  2. Look at it this way: it was better than the Fantastic Four’s 2007 sequel with “Galactus”

  4. I know first hand tea that they made Ryan Reynold bulk all up for nothing and make the fatal decision to cgi his costume in atrocious quality, which made it so hard for the audience to watch this film.

  5. Alioth is a great cloud of death enemy that was used correctly in Loki and in Deadpool & Wolverine. Make the cloud one of the issues not the issue

  6. Or.. You did the same old crap of “earth under threat”. Green lantern is an incredibly rich source of stories and characters not based on earth.

  7. Pretty sure the bad guy is still just a cloud with a face on it. 

    Also, the cgi suit looks dumb.

  8. And the Dirty Bubble is just a bubble with a face on it yet he works

  9. It might not have been the sole reason but even then i remember thinking what a ridiculous villain.

  10. Casino Royale was enough for me to let this guy have an overlooked blemish in his record

  11. Seems like Campbell wasn’t a superhero fan to begin with.

  12. How do you fuck up Mark Strong as Sinestro? By not utilizing him enough? Exactly!

  13. They tried to do too much and not enough. How hard would it be to listen to comic book people over Warner brothers’ executives? Obviously, pretty difficult.

  14. I don’t know how this guy directs Casino Royale, one of the greatest action movies of all time, and then does *this*. It really must not have been his fault.

  15. I don’t blame him completely. He did an AMA a while ago and commented then that this film was the most he had to fight the studio over.

    I think it’s been pretty clear for years that Warner Bros. don’t deserve the DC catalogue. Those characters are too rich to be wasted by picking either the wrong people for the job or sabotaging it for the few who do.

  17. The villain tends to make the story, not the hero. The hero is supposed to be an Everyman, so you could see yourself facing the big bad evil guy

  19. Exactly Right.

    As Siskel and Ebert called it

    A bag of smoke and bones

  20. Idk how you can fuck up a Green Lantern movie of all DC heros his story is so deep and expansive. Just, how do you fuck that up? It’s so easy to grab great ideas for the screen on the comics.

    The same can be said about Swamp Thing

  22. Martin Martin MARTIN, if you took out the bad guy, the movie still sucked

  23. My wife and i call these bad guys in movies “smoke monsters.” A TON of movies use this and its always dumb asf.

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