In the 2010s, while Marvel was riding high and cruising toward Avengers: Endgame, DC made a lot of bad superhero movies. After Christopher Nolan crafted The Dark Knight, which many people still consider to be the pinnacle of comic book movies, he followed that up with the mess that is The Dark Knight Rises. Zack Snyder also betrayed the character of Superman with his brooding take featured in Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. Suicide Squad and Justice League were also serious clunkers. Even the DC highlights of that era, like Wonder Woman and Aquaman, ultimately led nowhere and aged poorly thanks to mediocre sequels.
But even with all those misfires, the worst DC movie of the 2010s is probably still 2011’s Green Lantern.
Telling the story of how test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) became a member of the legendary space heroes known as the Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern was criticized for a whole bunch of reasons. People didn’t like the overly complex story or the underrealized characters, but more than anything else, they hated the suit for the Green Lantern, which was fully rendered in CGI.
Fans found the glowing green, rippling effect of the costume distracting and lacking in real-world textures. They took particular aim at the cartoonish, bright green mask and the fact that the form-fitting suit had individual toes instead of a boot. It was also felt that, with a CGI-rendered suit against CGI backgrounds, it gave the effect that Reynolds was just a floating head in the movie.
Yet despite all the CGI hate, a great many superhero costumes are rendered in CGI nowadays. In a sense, Green Lantern was just ahead of its time.
To be fair, the trend really began in 2008 with the first Iron Man movie. While practical suits were built of the Mark I, Mark II, Mark III by Stan Winston Studio, Industrial Light and Magic used that for reference to recreate the suits digitally to pull off shots where a practical suit wouldn’t work. Over time, fewer and fewer practical elements were needed for Iron Man.
But while the technology existed in 2008 to convincingly recreate a digital metallic suit that looks a lot like a robot, it was a few more years before fully CGI-rendered fabric suits became normal in superhero films. In 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man’s suit was entirely digital because Tom Holland was cast very late in the process, without time to make him a custom Spidey suit. And while fully CGI shots of Spider-Man date back to Sam Raimi’s movies, that was just for action scenes to pull off a particular stunt or effect, whereas none of the Spider-Man suit in Civil War is real. Subsequent Spider-Man movies would feature primarily digital suits too. By 2019, the practice was so common that even the white time-travel suits in Avengers: Endgame were also completely digital, with a design not being finalized until well into post-production.
There has been some backlash against this approach more recently. Spider-Man: Brand New Day went with a practical suit for the webslinger, as opposed to the CGI-rendered suits he’s worn since Civil War. And with increased scrutiny on Marvel’s digital effects work, Marvel will hopefully keep going in this direction.
Still, it’s a bit ironic that Green Lantern would end up so accurately predicting the future of superhero movies. While the technology clearly wasn’t there in 2011 — and all the glowing green effects probably didn’t help — perhaps, maybe, we all judged it a bit too harshly?