Johnny
Sidekick
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2010
- Messages
- 2,345
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 31
It was vast enough. It seemed more like a mixture of confusion & disappointment. A number of people were instantly turned off. It was the start of a bad buzz for the debut movie of an obscure character that couldn't afford it. The movie needed all the help it could get. This different Hawkgirl won't generate even a small fraction of the controversy that "making GL white" did tho.
It really wasn't a vast controversy. It wasn't some major social media uproar, it had some people wondering about "racebending" but it wasn't that huge. Justice League was a great and popular show in its heyday, but it wasn't some pop culture phenomenon. You make it sound as if it was like South Park in terms of popularity, where people would freak out if they racebend the characters in live-action. After the trailer and additional information came out, these people understood that the characters were different, which is frankly something they should've known already, considering Kyle was featured in the DCAU and it was shown that there is not "one" human GL. Though I admit it was funny reading comments like "I thought Hal Jordan was black". Those made my day.
WB/DC aims to make a profit, but that doesn't mean that the decisions they make are good ones that will yield profits. They aimed to make profit & start a franchise w/Hal's film & we see how that turned out.
It turned out the way it did, because as all of us here already pointed out, they horribly mistreated the material. We can keep arguing about which character should've been chosen and what could have/should have happened, but the indisputable fact remains that they presented the Green Lantern property to the movie masses in an exceptionally poor way. There is no way that a movie of such vastly mediocre quality can be a success story, whether the protagonist is a Caucasian fighter pilot, an African-American architect/former marine that was featured in an animated series from a decade and a half ago, or a half-Latino starving artist whose girlfriend was stuck in a refrigerator. If the studio plans to put all of these guys in the 2020 movie and still don't have their act together, we're in for similar dreadful results.
I'm not gonna speculate on how Hal's book sells more than those charters. Not really concerned about comic sales to be honest, but ALL of those characters get treated better than John has. Even people on the Hal side of this admit that DC doesn't seem to care much about him. I do think they wanted to kill him off & I doubt they'd have brought him back anytime soon.
Comic book deaths are publicity stunts done for sales spikes. I seriously doubt that John was either going to be killed, or not brought back soon, given how these stunts usually work and what I've read about the situation, but you are free to believe what you will.
Last edited: