Back when Warner Bros. were still confident enough that Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern would become a massive box office success and go on to launch a lucrative multi-film series, it was pretty clear from the second Mark Strong’s Sinestro showed up on the screen that he was going to eventually turn bad, even to audiences that were completely oblivious to the character’s comic book history.
The post-credits stinger teased Sinestro’s journey to the dark side, too, but as we all know, Green Lantern was a bomb of epic proportions. Leading man Ryan Reynolds has spent the last nine years making fun of it every chance he gets, while Strong went on to play another relatively underwhelming DC villain as Shazam!‘s Dr. Thaddeus Sivana.
Now that the Corps are finally heading back to live-action in Arrowverse co-creator Greg Berlanti’s HBO Max series, though, the slate can be wiped clean and the whole Green Lantern debacle can finally be consigned to the history books. And according to insider Daniel Richtman, Berlanti is planning on reintroducing Sinestro into the mix, which isn’t surprising given his status as the archenemy of Hal Jordan.
Of course, Hal isn’t slated to appear in HBO Max’s Green Lantern and wasn’t part of the leaked character lineup, but with the show set to introduce a brand new Lantern to act as the audience surrogate, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that some tweaks will be made to the established comic book mythology. The streaming exclusive comes burdened with high hopes and even greater expectations, after all, and it’ll be interesting to see if Ryan Reynolds ends up tuning in for the premiere when the first episode airs at some point next year.
