Why Did DC Try To Make A Jack Black Green Lantern Movie?

The Most Hated Green Lantern Movie Isn’t The One You Think

The Green Lantern mythology was, for a time, DC’s hottest property. Thanks to the talents of writer Geoff Johns, for most of the 2000s, Green Lanternwas one of DC’s best-selling comics, so much so that when there was a company-wide reset in 2011 called “The New 52,” every character was rebooted except for the Green Lantern books. That success hasn’t really translated into film or television. Sure, Lanterns(2026) has had a strong start, but before that, there was the Ryan Reynolds-led Green Lantern(2011), which has been derided by fans.

But what if I told you that there could have been an even worse Green Lantern movie? Impossible, right? Well, it almost happened, and if it was made, not only would it have been one of the most hated comic book movies of all time, but it would have had one of the craziest casting choices that any comic book fan would have ever seen. This is the story of how Jack Black almost was DC’s Green Lantern.

Why Did DC Try To Make Jack Black Into Green Lantern?

It doesn’t take a genius, or frankly, anyone with a few brain cells to understand why making Jack Black a Green Lantern was a bad idea. But, weirdly enough, Warner Bros. were tossing the idea around for a comedic Green Lantern movie for decades. 

Back in the late mid-1980s, propelled by the success of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, Warner Bros. were eyeing other DC Comics characters to give their own feature films to. Their first attempt at a Green Lantern movie would have starred Eddie Murphy, but that project fell through, and not much is known about it. By the turn of the millennium, thanks to the rising popularity of superhero movies, Warner Bros. decided to revive their idea for a comedic Green Lantern movie in 2004 and asked Robert Smigel to draft a screenplay.

If you don’t know who Smigel is, he had a storied career on Saturday Night Live(1975), appearing in sketches like Bill Swerski’s Superfans and establishing the TV Funhouse animated segment, and later even wrote the first two Hotel Transylvaniamovies. He also wrote the Dunkaccino segment in Jack & Jill(2011), which says everything you need to know. Smigel wrote the screenplay specifically for Jack Black, as he was on a hot streak thanks to movies like The School of Rock(2003), High Fidelity(2000), and Shallow Hal(2001), and he wanted Black to be the lead even before the script was finished. And boy oh boy, what a screenplay it was.

What Do We Know About The Movie? 

So Smigel and Black’s Green Lantern movie had a germ of a good idea lost under layers of mid-2000s comedy. You know the kind. The kind that makes you think of Epic Movie(2007). It probably has fans, but not many.

In Smigel’s script, Black wouldn’t have played any known Green Lantern like Hal Jordan or Kyle Raynor. No, he would be Jud Plato, a reality-TV star who would eat disgusting foods on a show called “The Dare Diner.” The plot would follow the basic outline of the Green Lantern story “Emerald Dawn,” where a Green Lantern named Abin Sur dies and his lantern searches for the next worthy wearer. Somehow, it deems Jud worthy, and he becomes what Smigel describes as “the laziest Green Lantern in history.”

In concept, having a Green Lantern that’s wholly unqualified for the job can be funny. It’s giving a total loser a tool that can create anything and everything he wants! But because this is the mid-2000s and low-brow jokes are all the rage, this film was set to have sequences like Jud stopping bank robbers by making a giant condom and making a construct of a teenage Britney Spears to ogle. Probably the one somewhat clever joke was ending the film by having Jud recreate the Christopher Reeve Superman, then reversing the events of the film by flying around the planet to go back in time a la Superman(1978). Sure, it could have worked, but it was probably going to be a complete disaster. Or at least, that’s what the fans thought.

Why Was Jack Black’s Green Lantern Movie Cancelled?

Nowadays, it seems companies are pretty ambivalent to the needs and desires of the masses. A company can openly make anti-consumer decisions and tell people today to accept them, but in the world of film back in the 2000s, that wasn’t the case.

Smigel’s Green Lantern script leaked online, and the backlash was brutal. Forums all across the internet lit up at how awful the script and premise were, chastising Warner Bros. for how moronic the film would be and how they believed the company thought they were idiots. The outcry against this was pretty loud, which is especially noteworthy because this was before the age of social media and sites like Facebook or YouTube. It was hard to organize online dissent, but leave it to comic book fans to find a way to unite over their hatred of this film.

Smigel and Black were still game for it, but by 2006, the executives at Warner Bros. ultimately decided not to move forward with their vision of Green Lantern. The exact reason for the film’s cancellation is a bit open to interpretation. It could have been that the groundswell of fan backlash was enough to spook them and not waste their money producing a movie that would have been DOA. It could have been the then-recent failure of Catwoman(2004), which tanked at the box office and was lambasted critically. There’s also the chance that they didn’t want a slovenly Green Lantern to share the limelight with Batman Begins(2005) and Superman Returns(2007), two films that offered more grounded and serious depictions of DC’s iconic heroes. Whatever the reason, Jack Black’s Green Lantern movie died before it could really get started, and we should be thankful every day for that.

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For centuries, a small but powerful force of warriors called the Green Lantern Corps has sworn to keep intergalactic order. Each Green Lantern wears a ring that grants him superpowers. But when a new enemy called Parallax threatens to destroy the balance of power in the Universe, their fate and the fate of Earth lie in the hands of the first human ever recruited.
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