Ryan Reynolds Reflects on ‘Green Lantern’ Flop and What It Taught Him

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Ryan Reynolds realized an important lesson from the failure of one of his biggest movies, Green Lantern. Despite a lot of hype and expectations for a summer hit, the DC film opened in theaters on June 15, 2011, to disappointing results. According to The Numbers, it only earned $219 million worldwide on a $200 million budget, barely breaking even.

Almost fifteen years after the film’s release, Ryan Reynolds, now 49, has acknowledged that Green Lantern wasn’t a creative success, but it taught him a valuable lesson: the importance of voicing his own ideas and opinions while filming.

He described a period where he felt overly eager to please authority, always saying ‘yes’ and doing whatever was asked of him. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s CMO Council Summit on November 18, as reported by People, he recalled feeling silenced creatively. He had strong ideas, but when someone else made a poor creative choice on a different project, he felt like he alone would suffer the consequences.

He explained that staying silent when he had ideas actually harmed his career. If a film received bad reviews or didn’t do well in theaters, the main actor was usually the one held responsible.

People don’t usually blame a single producer or director when a movie fails. But if a movie of mine does, I want to be the one who made the creative choices that led to that outcome – whether it’s a failure or a hit. I want to own the result, good or bad.

How ‘Green Lantern’ Changed Ryan Reynolds’ Life

Although Green Lantern wasn’t a huge financial or critical success, the movie had a positive impact on Ryan Reynolds’ personal life. He met his wife, Blake Lively, on the set in 2010. Lively, known for her role in Gossip Girl, played Carol Ferris, a key character and the love interest of Reynolds’ character, Hal Jordan.

Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively started dating in 2011 and married the following year. They now have four children: daughters James (10), Inez (9), and Betty (6), and a son named Olin (2), who is a big fan of Reynolds’ movie Green Lantern.

Reynolds joked to the audience that his son loves the movie and watches it constantly. He then explained the challenge of watching it himself without immediately thinking of ways to improve it, saying, ‘It’s been work getting to the point where I can walk past the screen and not think, ‘We could have done that differently!”

Despite the 2011 Green Lantern movie not being a major success, DC isn’t abandoning the characters. We’ve already seen Guy Gardner, played by Nathan Fillion, in James Gunn’s Superman (coming in 2025), and a new HBO series called Lanterns, from DC Studios and Warner Bros. Television, is planned for release around 2026.

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2025-11-30 02:06