Remembering the Failed Green Lantern Movie Starring Jack Black
Say what you will about Lanterns, we can all agree that it's better than the Jack Black comedy we almost got.
Brightest day has finally arrived for Green Lantern fans. Despite all the hand-wringing leading up to its premiere, the HBO series Lanterns is finally here and it’s really good. Just as importantly, it’s really strange, filled with way more DC cosmic lore than the early True Detective-style stills led us to believe.
Lanterns is so good, in fact, that it finally washes out the bad taste left by the last live-action adaptation, the awful 2011 movie that starred Ryan Reynolds as the most unlikable version of Hal Jordan. Bad as that movie is, the night was almost even blacker for Green Lantern fans. Throughout the 2000s, a totally different Green Lantern movie went into production, one that would have been a low-brow comedy starring Jack Black as Earth’s latest ring wielder.
Back in the 2000s, studios knew that people liked superhero movies, but they weren’t entirely sure what a superhero movie was supposed to be. So while that era saw big hits like Spider-Man and Batman Begins, it also saw some big, weird swings, like The Spirit, Catwoman, and the first Ghost Rider movie. That confused mindset drove Warner Brothers to look at one of their most beloved superheroes and decide that the right person to bring it to the screen was Saturday Night Live writer Robert Smigel, whose most notable superhero work was writing the Ambiguously Gay Duo cartoon shorts.
To his credit, Smigel knew that he may not be the best fit for the project, and tried to convince WB to make the movie about an original creation instead of an established character. But when they insisted on a Green Lantern film, Smigel looked into the property a found it pretty funny, actually.
“I did a quick review of the specifics of Green Lantern. And I thought, Well, of course this could be a comedy,” Smigel told Vanity Fair in 2011. “Basically just the premise that the wrong guy gets the ring and can do all kinds of goofy visual jokes—because the visuals are so potentially ridiculous. What appealed to me about it on a comedic level was that, in order to be a superhero, this requires no physical skill or talent. All it requires is owning this ring. Automatically, that’s a comedic premise.” Once he saw the vision, Smigel knew exactly who should play his goofy superhero: Jack Black.
The script leaked to the internet (which is explicitly a first draft) reads exactly like what you’d expect from a raunchy R-rated, Jack Black comedy from the ’90s. Black plays Jud Plato, a slacker with no future who goes on the reality series Fear Factor. When Jud eats a dead animal head without hesitation, the host (Joe Rogan?) declares him utterly fearless, a declaration that comes just when the Green Lantern power ring searches for a new host. The ring chooses Jud, and wacky shenanigans ensue.
Jud uses his ring to make babes to feed him food and captures bad guys in a giant condom. At the climax, he goes up against an astroid shaped exactly like Pikachu, foregrounding the video game-based alien invasion from Pixels. The movie even takes place in a world where superheroes exist, so when Jud tries to save the planet by moving it out the way of the oncoming meteor and inadvertently causes endless natural disasters, he creates a construct of Superman to fly around the Earth backwards, just like in the 1977 movie.
That said, Smigel’s Green Lantern script is actually far more faithful to the lore than one would expect. Smigel actually drew inspiration from Emerald Dawn, the 1989 miniseries by Keith Giffen, Christopher Priest, and Gerard Jones, penciled by M.D. Bright, which gave Hal Jordan a gritty post-Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot. In Emerald Dawn, Jordan’s predecessor Abin Sur gets attacked by a creature called Legion, a gold-suit wearing blob that wants revenge against the Guardians. When Abin Sur’s ship crashes, the ring finds alcoholic Hal Jordan, who learns to shape up under the tutelage of his mentor Sinestro, and eventually defeats Legion by violating the orders of Sinestro and the Guardians.
The Green Lantern script has the same basic set-up: Abin Sur crashes after getting attacked by Legion, and sends his ring to search for a successor. But when the ring malfunctions, it finds Jud instead of Jordan. After messing around for a while, Jud gets taken to Oa by Sinestro for training, where he also meets Kilowog and Tomar-Re. Jud’s misbehavior results in him losing his ring, even as the Legion threat grows more pressing. Those events give Sinestro reason to institute a harsh order over the Green Lantern Corps, revealing the authoritarian side.
After an act of valor earns Jud the right to wear the ring again, he learns the truth: Sinestro intentionally sabotaged Abin Sur’s ring, which not only allowed him to get killed by Legion but also to find an improper host and assert order. In the final act, Jud defeats the renegade Green Lantern and helps find his replacement, a woman from the same planet named Katma Tui.
From that synopsis, the Smigel Green Lantern movie doesn’t sound so bad. But then again, one need only look at the 2011 movie to remember that fidelity to the comics doesn’t automatically result in a good movie. Sometimes, you have to veer from the source material to tell a good story. Fortunately, Lanterns veers in the right way. The Jack Black Green Lantern movie? Not so much.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.