I head into the summer movie season with a great deal of optimism until I see a few on the long-awaited films and they turn out to be misfires. It’s at this point that I begin to approach the new releases with a degree of apprehension.
While I enjoyed Thor a great deal more than I expected, I was let down by X-Men: First Class, a film that I got the sense was going to be the underdog comic book film that would strike a more powerful chord with audiences.
Spinoff is reporting that Green Lantern, which opens next week, will not be screened for most critics until the eleventh hour. If you follow film, even casually, you’ll know that this is a strategy used by movie companies to prevent critics from publishing negative—of flat out scathing—early reviews. With Rotten Tomatoes being many people’s source of information on the quality of upcoming films, early negative reviews could be pretty damaging for a film. Typically, every genre website writes up something on the status of early reviews for comic book films.
There is a lot riding on Green Lantern. Warner Bros. is looking for new properties that will lift the imagination of movie audiences now that the Harry Potter series is coming to a close. With an endless stack of comic book properties at their disposal, Green Lantern seemed to be the first big screen adaptation of a second-tier comic book hero that would test the waters for those that could follow (e.g. Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, etc.). While I have been extremely happy with how closely the filmmakers appear to have embraced the source material, which is steeped heavily in sci-fi, I expect that if the movie fails to find an audience the blame may be laid upon those elements to which comic book fans seems to be responding.
I’m a realist. Movie companies don’t withhold films that they are proud to present from movie critics. I can’t help but go into Green Lantern next week with a fair amount of caution about the quality of the film. However, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
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