Green Lantern director on Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern jokes: ‘It doesn’t bug me at all’

If there’s one thing Ryan Reynolds loves more than playing Deadpool or owning a soccer team, it’s making jokes about his Green Lantern movie.

Barbs about its failure and his regrets about it have shown up in multiple Deadpool movies (there’s actually a convoluted continuity reason there’s no Green Lantern joke in Deadpool & Wolverine), and a bunch of press appearances. Pretty much any time Reynolds has an opportunity to joke about it, he will.

It might be easy to take that personally, if, say, you directed the movie. But Green Lantern director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro, and the upcoming Daisy Ridley action thriller Cleaner) has no problem with it.

“He’s got every right to,” Campbell told Polygon on a video call. “The film flopped. I mean, it’s just that.”

Released in 2011, Green Lantern was slammed by critics on release, and just barely made back its $200 million production budget. It also forced a change of course for Warner Bros., who had planned for Green Lantern to be the start of a new DC Universe. After the response to the movie, the company cancelled a planned sequel and instead pivoted to Man of Steel. The DC Universe is only just now ready to return to the character, with Nathan Fillion joining James Gunn’s upcoming Superman as Hal Jordan, and Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler leading the HBO series Lanterns.

While Reynolds has repeatedly joked about Green Lantern in the press and in his movies, he did admit in 2021, when watching the movie for the first time, that it wasn’t actually that bad and was supported by “incredible work” from the crew. It’s also the movie where he met his wife Blake Lively. Campbell agrees with that perspective — there are a lot of positives to take away even from the movies that don’t hit.

“It doesn’t bug me at all,” Campbell says. “We all worked bloody hard on it and so forth. I love working with him and I love working with Blake Lively. No problems. Everything was great, but the film flopped. And it was a great success for him because he met her.”

But Reynolds’ jokes about the movie — and his recent success leading a comic book franchise — has Campbell thinking of one change that could have helped Green Lantern.

“I wish to God he had written the script,” Campbell says. “He could have done a great job.”