They Can’t All Be Winners, Kid: Seven once-hopeful film franchises that never took off

Green Lantern

Warner Brothers had been throwing around concepts for an adaptation of DC Comics’ Green Lantern series for a number of years — at one point in the mid-aughts, Jack Black was attached, and it would have been certifiably a comedy — but eventually they gave up on that approach and settled for something more traditional. Ryan Reynolds was cast as Hal Jordan, a test pilot turned space-cop, and Reynolds’ smart-ass nature clashed with Jordan’s straight-laced persona from the comics. Martin Campbell (Goldeneye, Casino Royale) was hired to direct, and the movie was just a miserable and weird disaster, and everything from the CGI costumes to the awful humor to the villains (ugly-ass Hector Hammond and living embodiment of “yellow’ fear, Parallex) to Reynolds’ performance sunk what DC had hoped might give them a good start on the shared universe model that Marvel was in the process of perfecting. One sign of this was Angela Bassett’s character, government agent Amanda Waller, who was initially positioned to become something akin to a Nick Fury-type for that fledgling universe; and the sequel-suggesting post-credits scene seemed assured of its success. It flopped, and the DC folks had to go back to the drawing board.