Ryan Reynolds Explains How Making ‘Green Lantern’ Taught Him an Important Lesson

Ryan Reynolds is looking back at how he approached his work when he made 2011’s Green Lantern.

Reynolds, 49, briefly spoke about his experience making the infamous superhero movie during his appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Council Summit on Tuesday, Nov. 18.

“Creatively speaking, it’s hard to say. Someone might say Green Lantern,” he told moderator Maryam Banikarim, when asked to identify a past failure in his career, which then grew into a learning lesson.

Continuing, he explained, “You laugh, but my son, it’s his favorite movie and he watches it every f—— day,”

“Do you understand the work I’ve had to do to get to the place where I can just pass by that screen and not go, ‘Well, we could have [done something to make it better]?’ ” he asked the chuckling audience.

Reynolds famously met his wife Blake Lively when they costarred in Green Lantern. The movie was considered a critical and commercial failure, five years before Reynolds went on to find comic book stardom with his Deadpool series, adapted from the Marvel Comics character.

“But you know, that was a time in my life when I was ‘Yes, sir, no, sir. How high can I jump, sir?’ ” Reynolds said, reflecting on his creative approach earlier in his career. “You sit there and you go, ‘I have really strong thoughts and opinions on a creative matter,’ and someone else on another movie, I remember, made a creative decision, and ‘I thought, well, that’s a nail in a coffin that I alone will lie in.’ “

“And it’s true. They don’t say ‘This producer’s movie flopped,’ or ‘This director’s [movie flopped].’ That’s me. So if I’m going to be on that headline, I’d like to be the architect of my own demise — or success,” he added.

Reynolds has spoken openly about his disappointment with how the Green Lantern movie turned out. He only ever watched it in full for the first time back in 2021.

Though the movie did not hit with audiences or critics, it did lead to his marriage to Lively, 38, whom he wed in 2012. The couple now share four kids: James, 10, Inez, 9, Betty, 6, and Olin, 2.

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Reynolds previously said that he “learned all the most amazing lessons I could ever have in the creative space from that movie” when it came up during an interview at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City back in April.

“Too much money, too much time wrecks creativity,” he said at the time. “It just murders it. And constraint is the greatest creative tool you could possibly have. During that interview, Reynolds recalled that he thought “a lot of money [was] being spent at special effects and all sorts of stuff” on Green Lantern’s set instead of better creative effort.