TO become a Green Lantern, and there are 3,600 of those intergalactic peacekeepers in the movie that opens Friday, you must be able to overcome fear. It also helps to have a dorsal fin growing from the top of your head, as a Lantern voiced by Geoffrey Rush does. Owning the rippled abs of Ryan Reynolds doesn’t hurt either. But getting past fear, that’s the principal prerequisite.
That goes a long way toward explaining what is at stake with “Green Lantern,” which is a scary enterprise — at least for Mr. Reynolds and Warner Brothers.
Until now Mr. Reynolds, 34, has been best known for teddy bear roles in romantic comedies like “Definitely, Maybe” and “The Proposal”; he was there to look pretty and get his ears chewed on. Hollywood’s leading-man club, home to guys like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, has been harder to crack. Mr. Reynolds had a supporting role in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” but an effort last year to build an entire film around his presence, the thriller “Buried,” flopped badly, selling just $1 million in tickets in North America. His most successful turn in a title role arguably remains“Van Wilder,” the 2002 gross-out comedy in which he played a hard-partying college kid.
“Green Lantern” is this Canadian actor’s full-bore effort to prove that he can anchor a summer blockbuster replete with action figures, video games and theme-park rides. (Six Flags just opened “Green Lantern” roller coasters in New Jersey and California.) And talk about fear. He must do it while wearing a cheesy mask and tights — digitally drawn ones at least — and making lines like this sound believable: “Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.”
“Oh, man, was I nervous about it,” Mr. Reynolds said during an interview last week at the Sunset Tower Hotel here, adding that the gray motion-capture suit he wore for much of the shoot was not exactly calming. “You want me to do what? And I’m supposed to do it in crash-test jammies? At a certain point you have to have blind faith in the people you are working with and the talents they possess.”
Warner is holding on for dear life too. Just as “Green Lantern” is an effort by Mr. Reynolds to redefine his career, the picture represents a bid by the studio to create a superhero franchise outside of Gotham City or Metropolis. Batman and Superman are huge multiplex forces, and new cinematic adventures for both are on their way, but Warner has tried and failed for years to bring the likes of Wonder Woman, the Flash, Justice League and Green Lantern to the screen. (Let’s not even bring up “Catwoman.”)
All the while Marvel Entertainment, now owned by the Walt Disney Company, has catapulted one comic book character after another onto the big screen, most impressively the lesser-known Iron Man. If Marvel can turn Thor, a Viking with a magic hammer who travels by rainbow, into a box office hit, what’s the holdup at Warner, which has all of DC Comics at its disposal?
“Green Lantern,” which was once in development as a Jack Black comedy, is Warner’s first superhero release since making management changes at DC last year and more deeply integrating it into the studio’s development machinery. The pressure is intense not only because of the studio’s desire to compete with Marvel. The Harry Potter franchise ends in July, and Warner’s plan for replacing those riches turns squarely on DC characters. “Green Lantern” cost an estimated $300 million to make and market — on par with similar moves but still expensive. And buzz has been a problem. Although fans now seem to be on board, an early trailer was poorly received.
“We’re trying very hard to deliver,” said Jeff Robinov, Warner’s top movie executive. “Yes, there is a lot at stake. But I try and frame these things in terms of my own expectations. If you look at ‘Batman Begins,’ it did about $370 million worldwide and got us to a sequel.” A whopper of a sequel in “The Dark Knight,” which earned more than $1 billion at the global box office and showered DVD money on the studio.
“Green Lantern,” which was directed by Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale,” “The Mask of Zorro”), is a big, broad space extravaganza. Mr. Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a cocky but gifted fighter pilot who is the newest recruit to the Green Lantern Corps, a type of secret police for the universe. Each Lantern wears a ring granting him the ability to create anything his mind can imagine. Hal must master his new powers while pining for his Earthbound love interest (Blake Lively). He eventually fights a tarantula-looking villain called Parallax, which destroys planets; Peter Sarsgaard (“An Education”) plays an oddball professor turned Parallax henchman.
That galaxy-spanning canvas springs directly from Green Lantern comics, which started in 1940 after a cartoonist named Martin Nodell saw a New York City subway trainman wave a green lantern as an all-clear signal. But Warner is playing up the film’s vastness as a way to stand out amid superhero gridlock in theaters.
“It’s not a comic book movie as much as an epic adventure with huge scope and scale, a space opera in the vein of ‘Star Wars’ with an Earthbound ‘Top Gun’ vibe,” said Greg Berlanti, a producer of the movie and one of four credited writers.
In other words, in the post-“Iron Man” era a cool costume and a swarm of computer-generated effects may not pack them in anymore.
“Green Lantern” producers argue that Mr. Reynolds is a safety net to this high-wire act, saying he has emerged as a rare breed in Hollywood: a star who appeals equally to both sexes. His looks are accessible — handsome but not in a wax museum way — and he comes across as charming and smart in interviews, which captivates women. Meanwhile, studio marketers say, guys see him as friend material, somebody with whom it might be fun to play pickup basketball or grab a beer.
Mr. Reynolds displayed all those traits while slouched in a corner of the hotel. He was funny and slightly flirtatious with hotel staff members, fully aware of his perennial high ranking on People magazine’s sexiest men alive lists. Yet he was also low maintenance — he drove himself to the interview — and humble in a way that came across as natural and not practiced.
“Let’s just put it this way,” said Donald De Line, a “Green Lantern” producer, “we knew immediately that we put the ring on the right finger.”
Even so, Mr. Reynolds was required to do a screen test, and the studio considered other names, including Chris Hemsworth, who went on to play “Thor.” For his part, Mr. Reynolds, who is divorced from Scarlett Johansson, deflects such talk with self-deprecating humor.
“I’m just glad they didn’t ask me to play ‘Wonder Woman,’ ” he said. “On the other hand, that could be fun. The short shorts. The tall boots. What do you think?”
He proved his machismo on the “Green Lantern” set in Louisiana, where one sequence involved catapulting him 100 feet into the air to simulate flying — not bad for a guy who said he had been afraid of flight since a botched attempt at sky diving. He hurt his shoulder in a different stunt, and several scenes involved his landing face down on asphalt. “When I was 25, falling on cement was hilarious,” he said. “Now it feels exactly like falling on cement.”
If “Green Lantern” goes kersplat, Mr. Reynolds has plenty of backup gigs. He will return to theaters on Aug. 5 with “The Change-Up,” a body-switching comedy with Jason Bateman, and he just finished shooting “Safe House,” an action thriller co-starring Denzel Washington that is scheduled for a February release. Other projects include a zombie crime comedy (“R.I.P.D.,” with Jeff Bridges), two DreamWorks Animation films, and “Deadpool,” a spinoff featuring the mercenary he played in “Wolverine.”
But Mr. Reynolds will find himself wearing an awful lot of green if Warner has its way. The studio already has a “Green Lantern” sequel deep in development. “Establishing the world is the hardest, and if you get that right, and I think they did, you can really have some fun with a second and third movie,” Mr. Reynolds said.
Hopes are high for a “Green Lantern” series in part because the character has come back to life in published comics. DC killed off Hal Jordan in 1996 to shake up the story line (other Lanterns picked up his headlining duties), but sales suffered. In 2004 DC turned to the writer Geoff Johns to reintroduce Jordan. Fans cheered, and the Green Lantern has become one of the company’s best-selling titles.
“I’m really, really happy with how the film turned out,” said Mr. Johns, who became chief creative officer for DC Entertainment in 2010. “The characters, the personality, the lore — it’s all spot-on.”
Mr. Johns has the geek credentials to serve as a pied piper for fanboys, but he’s not exactly unbiased. What do real fans think of footage that Warner has shown? In April Ain’t It Cool News, the Web zine that serves as a barometer of taste in this corner of culture, sent joy pulsing through Warner with this post: “Inspired. This is exactly what I wanted from a ‘Green Lantern’ movie.”
That sentiment is a polar reversal from November, when Warner released a trailer (timed to play before “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1”) that seemed to mimic the winking humor of “Iron Man” and featured cartoony special effects. IndieWire.com, lamenting the “dodgy-looking special effects,” deemed the trailer “amateur hour.” There was a creeping dread that Warner’s big DC debut would hark back to the ridiculed “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.”
“We went out a little too early,” said Sue Kroll, Warner’s highly regarded movie marketing president. “For me it was a very important lesson. We had a great opportunity with ‘Harry Potter,’ but we didn’t have enough of the movie finished.” She added, “Once we did have some great moments to show, the feedback was unbelievable. I think people are now engaged and primed.”
Surveys that track audience interest back her up. Two weeks out “Green Lantern” was showing strong interest from men of all ages and solid interest among young women, leading to rough predictions of an opening weekend in the $50 million range, a robust result for a nonsequel. (If reviews are positive, older women may decide to come along for the ride.)
As with any superhero movie, Mr. Reynolds said, the core challenge is taking the story line seriously while signaling the audience that the film gets the joke. A scene near the end of “Green Lantern” neatly illustrates the point. As Mr. Reynolds and Ms. Lively prepare to kiss, she blurts out, “What the hell is with that mask?” Mr. Reynolds shrugs — the petite eye covering looked ridiculous, sure, but Hal Jordan wasn’t built to fear embarrassment.
His response: “Came with the outfit.”
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