Ryan Reynolds WAS almost Green Lantern in Zack Snyder’s Justice League

So, you may recall shortly after the announcement of Zack Snyder’s Justice League last year, there was a report that Ryan Reynolds was set to appear as Green Lantern at the end of the movie… and we did some spiffy art for it above.

We covered it in here and it certainly seemed like there was something to it.

Now, obviously, we know that, alas, Reynolds did not appear in the movie, but no it seems there WAS something to it, after all.

But first, let’s get spoilery… you have been warned.

In the movie we see two Green Lanterns during the course of events.

First up, during the flashback where we see Darkseid’s legiion attacking earth for the first time, we see Yalan Gur.

This alien Lantern, left, in the comics goes back many years and protects Sector 2814. We see him – much as we did in Whedon’s version of Justice League, getting taken down by Darkseid who almost a quires his Ring as Gur hits the ground (he gets a slightly more gruesome end in this version) before his ring shoots off into space, far from Darkseid’s clutches.

The second Lantern we see is witnessed in one of the flash forwards to the Knightmare future of earth.

This time it’s Kilowog we see.

Fans will know that Kilowog was the trainer/drill sergeant for the Green Lantern Corps on the planet Oa and was actually quite a prominent character in Reynolds’ Green Lantern movie.

Much like Yalan Gur, things don’t work out too well for Kilowog who – blink and you’ll miss it – lies dead in the future, beneath the feet of Superman:

However, on a larger Lantern role, Snyder had this to say to THR: “There was another idea I had for the Green Lantern that wasn’t Ryan, and so I thought that if we had gone down this path of Green Lantern, I would have had to have Ryan as the additional Lantern.” 

Wait… so Reynolds was at one time almost included in the movie!? I feel somewhat vindicated!

So, we know now that Martian Manhunter comes to Bruce Wayne and signs on to the Justice League but that role was originally meant to be Green Lantern – which is likely the scene we reported on in 2017 before Whedon’s version hit cinemas (here) – but which Lantern and why weren’t we allowed to see it in the movie?

Well, it seems DC/Warners said no to Snyder because they have other plans (likely the Justice League Corp series coming to HBO Max (here), not to mention the fact that the Arrowverse has likely got its own Lantern now (here), so maybe they thought three different versions of the Green Lantern Corp atne time was a bit much).

“The last scene with Martian Manhunter, originally, I had shot it in England. And the dialogue was very similar, but it was supposed to be one of the Lanterns,” Snyder says in a new interview.

“And then the studio had told me I wasn’t allowed to shoot anything. That there would be no film made of any kind. During production, that was a thing they insisted on. And I shot stuff anyway, of course, in my yard. And one of the things I shot was the Green Lantern scene. And then they asked me, when they saw the movie and saw that I put it in there, they’d take it out. And I said that I would quit if they tried to take it out. And I felt bad. The truth is I didn’t want the fans to not have a movie, just based on that one stand that I was going to take.

“And the Green Lantern was John Stewart. And that was part of it too. I was like, I don’t want to take a person of colour out of this movie. I’m not going to do it. And, but then, but I felt like having Harry Lennix’s Martian Manhunter at the end was, that was okay.”

Given that Lennix’s origins had been revealed earlier in the movie, this makes sense.

But the fact that Snyder couldn’t use Green Lantern despite having two in the movie seems a bit odd… but hey, we may not have got the DCEU’s current Green Lantern yet, but we got Martian Manhunter and that is very, very cool too.