Do Warner Bros. believe they have stumbled across a new
Harry Potter replacement?
Green Lantern reportedly
finished shooting on Saturday in Louisiana
amidst reports that Warner Bros. are so pleased with how their latest superhero movie is shaping up that they have astonishingly made plans to release
three Green Lantern movies, in three years. This rumour/theory has been further cemented today with news that
Michael Goldenberg has been hired to write
Green Lantern 2 - the sequel of an expensive tentpole that is still 10 months away from being released.
Unprecedented. Goldenberg, fittingly, wrote one of the Potter (Order of the Phoenix) movies, did a re-write on GL to suit director
Martin Campbell and has the Jodie Foster sci-fi drama
Contact on his CV. He'll be working from a treatment outlined by the original writing team of
Greg Berlanti, Marc Green and
Marc Guggenheim, and as he is Campbell's screenwriter of choice, it's encouraging for the former Bond director's commitment to the franchise from here on in. The strategy behind a quick Green Lantern trilogy is obvious - WB clearly want to be in the same position Marvel are in right now as they head towards the superhero ensemble of
The Avengers and they know they have some ground to cover. With GL, they believe they can quickly put together some successful movies that will eventually springboard other characters, even potentially other Green Lantern's into their own movies. By all the news we've heard, WB have been mighty faithful to the mythology of Lantern, and the scope is quite unlike anything we've ever seen in a WB superhero movie in terms of universes, character history, etc.
Bleeding Cool reported last week that GL 2 could be in theatres by the Summer or Christmas of 2012, presumably depending on when
Wonder Woman or
The Flash is due. And then a third movie could follow the year after. What would this mean for the X-Men spin-off
Deadpool? Well - it's obvious WB don't want to see their marquee name prance around in a Marvel costume for a rival studio and they will want to keep him exclusively as Lantern, so any contract Fox might have that holds Reynolds down for Deadpool could easily be bought out by WB.
Usually I would say without Reynolds, Fox probably don't have a movie, though in truth the character was to be depicted as so wildly different (basically his first on screen appearance brushed aside) that a re-casting, no matter how perfect Reynolds is for the role, would actually be beneficial and maybe they could continue without him. Last we heard, Fox wanted Reynolds to commit to a scheduling date soon to film Deadpool under the direction of
Robert Rodriguez, but who knows now?