Cover art to GREEN LANTERN #145
© 2001 DC Comics

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Jack Black Talks GREEN LANTERN

A few years ago, Jack Black was set to star and help develop a big screen adaptation of the comic superhero. Judging by the interview with MTV, his GREEN LANTERN would have been vastly different than the GL we may see in the upcoming JUSTICE LEAGUE film. Black goes on to explain how he loved a script treatment a friend developed for the character featuring a more comedic take on GL.

Here's what he told Larry Carroll at MTV;

“Oh yeah,” he remembered recently, before making an all-in-fun reference to the WB keyholders currently auditioning actors like Common and T.I. for the superhero role. “The bastards!”

Now, Black is talking back about the “Green Lantern” movie, revealing details of the movie we’ll never see. “I really liked the script that a friend of mine wrote,” he remembered of the comedic take on the character. “But nobody wanted to make it; it was too weird.”

In 2004, rumors began surfacing that Black (hot off films like “School of Rock”) was in talks to play a common man who found himself as the newest member of the Corps. Influenced heavily by the Jim Carrey hit “The Mask,” the script was to depict an overweight hero using the power ring in comedic ways.

“I was going to be making all kinds of stuff,” Black said of the ring, which gives its possessor the power to create anything that can be imagined, and in the comic books usually manifests itself as green cages, weapons, walls, boxing gloves, etc.

“I was going to be capturing bad guys with green, giant prophylactics,” Black remembered of one scene in the script. “Some funny stuff.”

If that doesn’t sound like a good idea, you might want to take a moment to thank the most unlikely of saviors: Halle Berry’s “Catwoman.” That disloyal-to-the-comic movie’s disappointing box office, coupled with an intensely negative Internet reaction to the comedian’s casting, quickly killed Jack Black’s “Green Lantern.”

“It would have been a comedy, and I don’t know, maybe they didn’t want to go that way with the character,” the “Margot at the Wedding” star sighed. “You don’t see a lot of the superheroes as comedies. Batman, Superman, Spiderman - they’re all pretty straight-up.”