Ryan Reynolds Admits Regret Over One of His Biggest Flops

Ryan Reynolds has joked about regretting one of his biggest Hollywood roles: Green Lantern.

The actor even poked fun at himself in a mid-credits scene in Deadpool 2, where the superhero travels back in time and shoots a version of Reynolds reading the Green Lantern script. “You’re welcome, Canada,” Reynolds says in the scene, highlighting the flop that the film became.

In a 2016 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Reynolds explained why the movie didn’t work. “Well, it’s simple: Deadpool always knew what it was,” he said.

“With Green Lantern, I don’t think anyone ever figured out exactly what it was… It also fell victim to the process in Hollywood, which is like poster first, release date second, script last. At the time, it was a huge opportunity for me, so I was excited to try and take part in it.”

Looking back at the experience years later, Reynolds described the film as a “disaster.” “There was just too many people spending too much money and when there was a problem rather than say, ‘OK, let’s stop spending on special effects and let’s think about character,’ that just never… the thinking was never there to do that,” he said.

“And to their credit, it’s a very old school way of looking at things. It’s just ‘Let’s just keep spending our way through this.’ And that was… it didn’t work.”

Reynolds also revealed how surreal it was to finally see the finished film. “The words were ‘holy s***’ and ‘no, no!’ It was crazy. It was an odd feeling. It was not a feeling I wanted to repeat. So I really spent the following years just owning as much as I could, it was the only way to kind of process it.”

Critics largely agreed with Reynolds’ self-assessment. On Rotten Tomatoes, Green Lantern holds a 25% approval rating based on 248 reviews, with the consensus reading: “Noisy, overproduced, and thinly written, Green Lantern squanders an impressive budget and decades of comics mythology.” Metacritic scored it 39 out of 100, indicating generally unfavorable reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B on an A+ to F scale.

While many reviews were critical, a few praised certain elements. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote the movie “serves up all the requisite elements with enough self-deprecating humor to suggest it doesn’t take itself too seriously.”

Roger Ebert noted that Reynolds was “heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability; there is no instinct for self-preservation here, and that is one mark of a good actor.” Other critics, like Manohla Dargis of The New York Times and Christy Lemire of the Associated Press, were less impressed, pointing to weak dialogue and excessive special effects.

Despite the mixed reception, Reynolds has embraced the film’s reputation in his own humorous way. The actor has since leaned into self-parody, using Green Lantern as a cautionary tale about the challenges of big-budget superhero movies.

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