Ryan Reynolds Reveals The Movie He Wishes He Never Made

Ryan Reynolds has been open about his regret over one of his biggest films, Green Lantern.

The actor even joked about it in a mid-credits scene in Deadpool 2, where Deadpool travels back in time, finds Reynolds reading the Green Lantern script, shoots him, and says, “You’re welcome, Canada.” The gag highlighted Reynolds’ feelings about the movie and its poor reception.

In a 2016 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Reynolds explained why the film didn’t work. “Well, it’s simple: Deadpool always knew what it was,” he said.

“With Green Lantern, I don’t think anyone ever figured out exactly what it was… It also fell victim to the process in Hollywood, which is like poster first, release date second, script last. At the time, it was a huge opportunity for me, so I was excited to try and take part in it.”

Reynolds later reflected on watching the film, which he called a “disaster.” “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.’ That just never… the thinking was never there to do that,” he told the outlet.

“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, “The words were ‘holy s****’ and ‘no, no!’ 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.”

Critics largely agreed with Reynolds’ self-assessment. On Rotten Tomatoes, Green Lantern holds a 25% approval rating based on 248 reviews, with the consensus stating, “Noisy, overproduced, and thinly written, Green Lantern squanders an impressive budget and decades of comics mythology.” Metacritic gave the film a score of 39 out of 100, indicating generally unfavorable reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a “B.”

Some critics found a few positives, however. Variety’s Justin Chang called it a “highly unstable alloy of the serious, the goofy and the downright derivative.” Roger Ebert said the movie “does not intend to be plausible. It intends to be a sound-and-light show… If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.”

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that it “serves up all the requisite elements with enough self-deprecating humor to suggest it doesn’t take itself too seriously.”

Despite the mixed reception, Reynolds has taken it all in stride, using the experience to fuel his later successes. His reflections show how he learned from the film’s missteps while embracing humor to deal with what many consider a career misfire.

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