4. Jack Black As... The Green Lantern
Believe it or not, fans are lucky that 2011's Green Lantern was the first time the Emerald Knight was featured on the big screen, and never had to witness the atrocity that would have been New Line Cinema's Green Lantern film starring Jack Black. Even though that's a terrible casting choice for the character, it is nowhere near the worst thing about the movie. In 2004, New Line was drowning in cash after the release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and were in possession of the Green Lantern movie rights. The studio hired Robert Smigel, the creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a longtime writer on Saturday Night Live and Late Night With Conan O'Brien, to pen the script. The film would have been a big-budget, raunchy comedy which the studio compared to 1994's The Mask. Green Lantern would have been an inept, overweight superhero, using his power ring in comical ways. This Green Lantern wouldn't have been Hal Jordan, or any of the other famous comic incarnations of the character, for that matter. Instead, it would have been a man named Jud Plato, an average schmuck who works in a furniture store and stars in a TV show called "The Dare Diner." He performs a number of crazy, repulsive stunts for the show, and when the Power Ring chooses him after Abin Sur's death, Plato is in the process of eating the uncooked head of a dead coyote in front of a live audience. The film only gets worse from there, and before Plato even makes it to Oa, the interstellar home of the Green Lantern Corps., he manages to trap a gang of robbers by using a giant green condom conjured from his power ring, create a green elf for his nerd friend to have sex with, create a green Superman to please a confused crowd of onlookers, turn bullets into popcorn kernels, and try to sleep with his coworker, Corinne. The entire script reads like an incredibly lame, egregiously offensive comedy with absolutely no respect payed to the mythos that it draws inspiration from. It's clear that the studio was only using the Green Lantern name to promote the film and take advantage of the character's loyal fanbase. Thankfully, the movie fell apart after an extremely negative backlash from fans, and despite Jack Black's continual dedication to the project over the years, it will never come to fruition. Say what you want about Ryan Reynolds in the role, or the 2011 film itself, but we undoubtedly dodged a bullet with this one.