Of all the 2011 summer blockbusters once thought too big to fail, Green Lantern probably sat upon the least stable foundation going into opening weekend. Featuring a mid-eschelon comics hero played by box-office cipher Ryan Reynolds, the CGI and marketing budgets soared even as buzz maintained below that of fellow comic-book/graphic novel adaptations Thor, X-Men: First Class, and the forthcoming Cowboys and Aliens and Captain America -- to say nothing of the lingering word-of-mouth around Super 8 or the global hype accompanying next week's Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Then came the reviews, and then came the fizzle -- not a failure outright, but with an estimated $350 million (or more) tied up in the franchise hopeful, we all join Warner Bros. this morning in asking, "What's next?"
That is a great question, and one for which observers will wait to see crucial week-two returns before writing Lantern off entirely. But a $52.6 million opening -- nearly $6 million below even the studio's own conservative projections -- portends a domestic tally capping out around $200 million. Foreign returns so far aren't encouraging, either: In limited territories, Lantern drew $17 million, undershooting Thor's opening weekend by half in markets including the UK and Russia. (Lantern will continue its international rollout throughout the summer.) These numbers are inflated thanks to 3-D, a dying fad that may well have been driven out of theaters by dissatisfied viewers and/or exhibitors by the time another mega-expensive sequel makes it to multiplexes. Against the examples of Batman and Iron Man, this is not the stuff superhero franchises are made of.
Additionally, to the extent he has a point at all, New Yorker critic David Denby today levels an intriguing charge against Green Lantern and other purveyors of the "digital" and "CGI" scourge:
One reason that C.G.I. has become so widespread is that it makes the fantastic available not just to the artists but to the unimaginative and the graceless as well. Any plot difficulty can be resolved by turning a man into a beast, or a beast into a man, or by having a character vanish altogether, or by hurling someone across a room and smashing him against a wall without his suffering more than an itty-bitty bruise. [...] Movies based on that kind of imagery may be sensational as design, but they aren't likely to fill us with the empathy, dread, and joy inspired by fictions about people making their way through a world where walls are solid, gravity is unrelenting, and matter is indissoluble. Storytelling thrives on limits, inhibitions, social conventions, a world of anticipations and outcomes. Can you have a story that means anything halfway serious without gravity's pull and the threat of mortality?
So, fuddy-duddyness and the very real symptoms of CGI fatigue aside, what if what we're really tired of is the battering, clattering unreality of it all -- that even our escapist moviegoing quests are entitled to something a little more practical? It can still be absurd (the Hangover films, Bridesmaids) or utterly revisionist (Inglorious Basterds, Super 8), but at least it owes something to a relatable world that exists outside the theater doors. What if Green Lantern is the tipping point of taste, a firehose blast of extraplanetary alien dealings that boasts neither the photorealism of Avatar nor the character firmament of Iron Man, and thus crosses the threshold into irrelevance? What if viewers, in their apathy, are saying, "We'll take your garbage, Hollywood, but we won't pick up your shit"?
In any case it's probably too late for Green Lantern to rebound, though never count out the propensity of studio bosses to throw good money after bad -- just less of it, and maybe with more investment in that little thing called a script. We'll see. But how do things look from where you stand?