James Gunn has revealed Ryan Reynolds’s brutal response when asked if he would reprise the role of Green Lantern.
Reynolds played the DC Comics superhero in the poorly received 2011 film Green Lantern, and subsequently found greater fame as Marvel’s Deadpool.
Gunn, who took over as the boss of DC Studios alongside producer Peter Safran two years ago, revealed during a recent podcast appearance that he had sounded Reynolds out about a potential Green Lantern return.
“Ryan doesn’t give a s***,” Gunn said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“One of the first people I talked to after I got the job was Ryan Reynolds. I was like, ‘You coming back?!’ He’s like, ‘Get the f*** out of here!’”
Reynolds’s blunt response will likely come as little surprise, given the actor’s public mockery of the film in recent years.
Last year, the Adventureland star described his horror at viewing Green Lantern for the first time.
“The words were ‘holy s***’ and ‘no, no!’” he recalled. “It was crazy. It was an odd feeling. It was not a feeling I wanted to repeat. So I really spent the following years just owning as much as I could, it was the only way to kind of process it.”
Reynolds went on to explain in greater detail why he felt the film failed.
“There was just too many people spending too much money and when there was a problem rather than say, ‘OK, let’s stop spending on special effects and let’s think about character’,” Reynolds said.
“That just never… the thinking was never there to do that,” he said, adding. “And to their credit, it’s a very old school way of looking at things. It’s just ‘Let’s just keep spending our way through this.’ And that was… it didn’t work.”
He added: “At the same time, there are 185 people that worked on that movie – they all had an amazing time, we loved shooting it. Truly, shooting the movie was a lot of fun. But, you know, sitting in that premiere, watching that… oh my God, it’s tough.”
Gunn’s planned “soft reboot” of the DC universe has yet to begin in earnest, with a Superman film starring David Corenswet among the projects currently in development.
While many of the franchise’s biggest superheroes are expected to be re-introduced with new actors, Gunn has confirmed that some of the characters will be carried over from the past decade of DC franchise films and TV shows.
