‘Green Lantern’ Director Martin Campbell on Why the Superhero Film Flopped: ‘Our Bad Guy Was Just a Cloud With a Face on It’

As the director of “Green Lantern,” Martin Campbell was far from the first, and certainly not the last filmmaker to deliver a stinker of a DC superhero film. But 14 years after its release, Campbell is unafraid to be honest about its shortcomings — especially the ones he takes personal responsibility for.

Speaking to Variety during a recent press day for his upcoming thriller “Cleaner,” Campbell says the experience of making the film left him with a very specific level of interest in making superhero films: “None whatsoever.” Reflecting on its commercial underperformance (it grossed $237 million against a reported $200 million budget), he blames his unfamiliarity, and consequently, lack of enthusiasm with the genre.

“It didn’t do business, I think, for a number of reasons, but the reason I did it was simply I’d never done one before,” he says. “I think quite honestly, if you’re going to do a superhero movie, you have to be in that world a little bit, you know what I mean? You have to be excited by it. You have to have a background where you are part of that world and you’ve been involved in that thing. And I wasn’t.”

Touching on the film in past interviews, Campbell had previously described himself as “the wrong director” for the film. But he emphasized that that epiphany was one he didn’t have until afterward. “I read all the comics and so forth. All the characters are true to the comics, if you see what I mean,” he says. Even so, he suggests that the script he was working from didn’t help. “I’m not blaming it on that. I’m simply saying I don’t think that the script was great. I also felt that Parallax, our bad guy, was just a cloud with a face on it — literally, that’s all it was.”

“And also you had Ryan and you had Blake who were, by the way, wonderful to work with — I have to say, both terrific,” he adds. “ I think while all the characters were part of the story … part of the comics basically, I think the story was left wanting.” Campbell also says that the film’s ending was compromised by cost concerns. “I had a totally different ending to the movie, or the last third of it, all of which was scrapped in the interest of budget,” he recalls.

Despite those obstacles, Campbell recognizes that responsibility for the failure of “Green Lantern” falls upon him — and he accepts that. “Listen, I’m not making any excuses,” he insists. “When you direct and people don’t like it, you suck it up and you say, ‘Well, I’m the director, so that’s my fault’.

“I mean, the point was that I made that film simply because I hadn’t done a superhero movie before and the film failed, as simple as that.”