It's Just Movies

— by CAM SMITH —

Despite having just wrapped principal production last Friday, and with almost a year until its grand public unveiling, DC and Warner Bros. must be feeling really confident that they’ve got something special in “Green Lantern.” In fact, they’re so confident that they’ve not only announced a sequel but also named the writer who will be mapping out the next Hal Jordan adventure – which may even take two more films to tell. No guts, no glory, I suppose.

As reported in Variety, Michael Goldenberg, the screen-writer behind “Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix,” “Where the Wild Things Are” and the first “Lantern,” has been re-hired to tackle the sequel treatment idea that was conjured up by his fellow “Lantern” scribes Greg Berlanti, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim a while back. More intriguingly, rumors have been filtering out of the studio that the planned story is so immense that it could potentially require back-to-back productions ala “The Back to the Future” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequels.

Although it’s not uncommon to hear news of sequels or spin-offs well before the release of an initial film (“The Hangover” and “Sherlock Holmes” spring to mind), it’s important to realize that these chest-thumping announcements can also be retracted lickety-split should a fledgling franchise prove to be a non-starter (“The Golden Compass,” anyone?). I’m optimistic that director Martin Campbell and star Ryan Reynolds have a hit on their hands, but it’s still a bit too early to take this news as a solid guarantee.

However, if this does come to pass, and two “Lantern” movies wind up shooting back-to-back, I sincerely hope the filmmakers take painstaking efforts to avoid the convoluted, messy pitfalls that both “The Matrix” and the “Pirates” series plunged headlong into. One need look no further than the “Back to the Future” and “Lord of the Rings” movies to see how separate pictures shot at the same time can achieve their own proper look, feel and tight, individual story-lines. Hopefully, the “Lantern” crew are taking this under close consideration.

In other exciting “Green Lantern” news, Comic Book Movie posted up some concept art for the alien drill sergeant Kilowog. Though it’s not clear at this point how large a role the character plays in the movie, I’m pleased to see that no attempts have been made to diminish his otherworldly oddness, and it’ll be cool to watch a superhero effort that dares to tread some serious sci-fi geek ground.

So how do IJM readers feel about this sequel news? Is the studio counting its chickens before they’ve hatched? And how to you feel about the prospect of back-to-back productions? And where do you stand on the Kilowog design? Launch on over to our comments section and sound off.

. . .

Follow Cam Smith on Twitter at http://twitter.com/camspcepisodes.