Superman’s Guy Gardner Isn’t Nathan Fillion’s First Green Lantern Role

Nathan Fillion occupies a rare place in fandom that only a few performers occupy. Like Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Bruce Campbell before him, he’s a geek favorite because he can play certain stock characters with such confidence. He first made his name on television as jukebox repairman Johnny Donnelly in Two Guys and a Girl, and as the conniving captain Malcolm “Mal” in Joss Whedon’s short-lived science fiction film Serenity. – He won the hearts of fans with his role as Reynolds. fi series “Firefly”. Fillion’s television profile gradually rose in the 2010s, with his role as thriller novelist Frank Castle opposite Stana Katic as Detective Kate Beckett on ABC’s “Castle,” a top 20 hit in the Nielsen ratings. It became. He was so likable in these various roles that comic book readers began fancasting him as a hero with an eccentric appeal.

Because of this, before the casting of the 2011 Warner Bros. film, quite a few fans became obsessed with the concept of Fillion as Hal Jordan, an Earth-born member of the Green Lantern Corps. They actively lobbied the studio and DC to cast him as the iconic hero, and the role apparently went to Ryan Reynolds, but Fillion didn’t go home empty-handed. No, we’re not talking about Fillion being cast as bowl-shaped jock Guy Gardner in James Gunn’s new Superman movie. More than a decade before doing this spot-on gig, Fillion donned the ring in another medium.

The movie business is very much a business, and with the 2011 film Green Lantern costing Warner Bros. a staggering $200 million to make, the studio chose a younger, hipper person than Fillion to play the title character. I chose star. In retrospect, this worked out well for Fillion considering “Green Lantern” bombed. If he had gotten a star player for that movie, he might have become a joke in the industry. This was before “Castle” was a huge hit, so he cast the lead role from a failed TV series. and Starring a big-budget superhero movie, a spin-off of an equally unpopular film, and Fillion would look like a bad luck charm for the future of entertainment.

Instead, DC found a comfortable, low-key home for Fillion, voicing Hal Jordan in the direct-to-video animated films Green Lantern: The Emerald Knights and Justice League: Doom. Both films were well-received by the fan base and critics (the former is rated 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, the latter boasts a perfect 100% score), and Fillion had a great time. As he told Slice of Science in 2012:

“This kind of work makes me happy. It makes me smile. When I’m doing these narrations, I like to live in the moment. I suspend reality for just a moment. You know what Green Lantern is like, you know the situation, you know the characters that surround him, and I want to live that moment as if I were there. I think…and that makes me. [smile]. ”

Fillion has already made comic book fans laugh, if not laugh out loud, with his brief and subtly subversive cameo in the first trailer for James Gunn’s epic Superman movie. This is just one of the reasons why there is even more excitement leading up to the film’s release on July 11, 2025. release. Is it too much to ask Fillion’s Gardner to make his own movie? WB may be cool to the idea given the bad juju caused by the 2011 film (which cost the studio about $120 million in losses), but perhaps comic book geeks think otherwise There will be 1 million people. If Gunn’s film is to right the wrongs of the failed revival of the Man of Steel series by directors Bryan Singer and Zack Snyder, then director Guy Gardner has a good chance of succeeding.