Production notes

In early 1997, Warner Bros. Pictures approached cult filmmaker and comic book writer Kevin Smith, who had then just finished writing Superman Lives, to script a Green Lantern film. Smith turned down the offer, believing there were more suitable candidates to make a Green Lantern film. At one point, Quentin Tarantino was offered the chance to write and direct. Warner Bros. also considered the property as an action comedy; by 2004, Robert Smigel had completed a script which was set to star Jack Black in the lead role, but the studio dropped the comedy idea following poor fan reaction from the Internet and chose to focus on a serious Green Lantern film instead. David S. Goyer was offered the chance to write and direct either a Green Lantern or The Flash film after Warner Bros. was impressed with his screenplay for Batman Begins, but he opted to direct the latter. Actor-writer Corey Reynolds, a comic book fan of the John Stewart character, pitched to Warner Bros. an idea for a trilogy, with him starring and performing screenwriting duties. He finished the script for Green Lantern: Birth of a Hero in June 2007, receiving positive feedback from Warner Bros. Reynolds hoped for a potential 2010 release date. However, for unknown reasons, the studio abandoned Reynolds' concept. In October the same year, Greg Berlanti signed to direct the film and cowrite it with comic book writers Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim. A draft of the trio's 2008 script, leaked on the Internet, revealed a story that included the hero's origin and included the characters Carol Ferris, Kilowog, Sinestro, and Guy Gardner in a cameo appearance, and appeared "to set up Hector Hammond as Hal Jordan's ... first major nemesis...." Earlier drafts of the script also included a Superman cameo appearance, which was later scrapped. Shortly afterward, Guggenheim said that the script would contain characterizations inspired by Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams' run on Green Lantern in the 1970s, and Dave Gibbons' work in the early 1980s. He added that he and his co-writers also looked to the 2000s Geoff Johns stories: "It's been interesting because we finished a draft just before Johns' "Secret Origin" story arc started up. So I've been reading "Secret Origin" with a real interest in seeing 'OK, how did Geoff solve this problem?' There are certain elements just for anyone trying to retell Hal's origin for a modern-day audience to address and grapple with. For example, why the hell was Abin Sur flying in a spaceship when he's a Green Lantern? You don't ask that question back in the Silver Age, but when you're writing in the Modern Age, you have to answer these things".

By December 2008, the writers had written three drafts of the screenplay and Warner Bros. was preparing for pre-production. By February 2009 Berlanti was no longer attached to the project and Martin Campbell entered negotiations to direct. The release date was set as December 2010, before being moved to June 17, 2011. Speaking about the experience in 2016, Berlanti confirmed that he was fired as both director and writer, stating that he had nothing to do with the finished product. Bradley Cooper, Ryan Reynolds, Justin Timberlake, and Jared Leto were the producers' top choices for the starring role in July 2009. On July 10, Reynolds was cast as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern. Reynolds took the role after 20th Century Fox had no intention to make a Deadpool film. A website reported on January 7, 2010, that a crew-member had written on her blog that the film was greenlit the day before and that filming would begin in 10 weeks. Also in January, Blake Lively was cast as Carol Ferris, Peter Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond, and Mark Strong as Sinestro. In February, Tim Robbins joined the cast as Senator Hammond. The following month, New Zealanders Temuera Morrison and Taika Waititi had joined the cast as Abin Sur and Tom Kalmaku, respectively.

With a production budget of $200 million, Green Lantern was initially scheduled to begin filming in November 2009 at Fox Studios Australia. The start date was pushed back to January 2010, but the production moved to Louisiana, where, on March 3, test footage was filmed in Madisonville involving stunt cars. Principal photography began on March 15 in New Orleans, which doubled for Coast City, California, a fictional city in DC Comics. Nine days after filming began, Angela Bassett joined the cast as Amanda Waller, a government agent who is a staple of the DC Comics universe. The same year in April, Jon Tenney was cast as Hal Jordan's father, test pilot Martin H. Jordan. Against Campbell's wishes, the film's production head decided to have the sequence of Martin's death in an air crash intercut with Hal plunging in the plane and witnessing the flashbacks coming to him. By June, filming began at New Orleans Lakefront Airport. In the same month, Mike Doyle was cast as Jack Jordan, the older brother of Hal Jordan. In July, Ryan Reynolds was injured while shooting scenes for the film, separating his shoulder and in "lots of pain". While promoting Deadpool (in which Reynolds portrays another famous comic book superhero) in 2016, Reynolds said that filming Green Lantern itself had been frustrating: "You really need a visionary behind a movie like that, but it was the classic studio story: 'We have a poster, but we don't have a script or know what we want; let's start shooting!'" In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant in 2021, Campbell reflected that he should not have directed the film after all and admitted responsibility for the film "not working out". Comparing to how he saw all James Bond films before directing Casino Royale, Campbell acknowledged that superhero movies were never his "cup of tea". In 2025, Campbell also stated that the film would have been better had Reynolds also written the script.

Principal photography ended on August 6, 2010. In an interview with MTV News, director Martin Campbell was asked about the film's effects-heavy epic scale and commented that it was a daunting process and that the film has 1,300 visual shots. When asked about the constructs created from the power rings, Campbell answered: "One of the nice things is, we'll all sit down and say, 'Well, what are we going to do here?' Really, it's as much as your imagination can go to make the constructs". The studio also confirmed that the film would have a 3D release. In January 2011, Green Lantern began re-shoots for key scenes at Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles, California. In March, Geoffrey Rush joined the cast as the voice of the CGI-created character, Tomar-Re. In April, Michael Clarke Duncan was cast as the voice of Kilowog. Also that month, Warner Bros. raised the visual effects budget by $9 million and hired additional visual effects studios to bolster the ranks of the team that had been working overtime to meet the film's release date. The film's theatrical running time ended up being 114 minutes.

Green Lantern had its world premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California on June 15, 2011. Green Lantern opened on Friday, June 17, 2011, in North America, earning $3.4 million in 1,180 midnight runs. The film grossed $21.4 million on its opening day. It earned $53.2 million during its opening weekend, taking the number-one spot. In its second weekend, Green Lantern dropped into third place behind Cars 2 and Bad Teacher, experiencing a 66 percent decline, which was the largest second-weekend decline for a superhero film at the time. Green Lantern grossed $116.6 million in the United States and Canada, as well as $120.6 million internationally, bringing its worldwide total to $237.2 million. Many industry analysts felt that Green Lantern "failed to perform to expectations". The Hollywood Reporter speculated that Green Lantern needed to make approximately $500 million to be considered financially solid. Some publications listed the losses for the studio as high as $75 million.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 25% based on 248 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads: "Noisy, overproduced, and thinly written, Green Lantern squanders an impressive budget and decades of comics mythology". Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 39 out of 100 from 39 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. Justin Chang of Variety gave Green Lantern a mixed review, stating that "Martin Campbell's visually lavish sci-fi adventure is a highly unstable alloy of the serious, the goofy and the downright derivative". Manohla Dargis of the New York Times was generally negative to the film, despite having some praise for Ryan Reynolds, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, and Angela Bassett. Christy Lemire of the Associated Press called it a "joyless amalgamation of expository dialogue and special effects that aren't especially special". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times had mixed feelings: "Green Lantern does not intend to be plausible. It intends to be a sound-and-light show, assaulting the audience with sensational special effects. If that's what you want, that's what you get". British newspaper The Daily Telegraph named Green Lantern one of the ten worst films of 2011. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter gave it a positive review, saying the film "serves up all the requisite elements with enough self-deprecating humor to suggest it doesn't take itself too seriously". Reviewer Leonard Maltin felt that "the film offers a dazzling array of visual effects, a likable hero, a beautiful leading lady, a colorful villain, and a good backstory. It also doesn't take itself too seriously". Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "More science-fiction space opera than superhero epic, it works in fits and starts as its disparate parts go in and out of effectiveness, but the professionalism of the production make it watchable in a comic book kind of way".

After he watched Green Lantern for the first time in March 2021, Reynolds tweeted, "Maybe it's the Aviation Gin talking, but #GreenLantern was nothing to fear! Hundreds of incredible crew and cast members did amazing work—and while it's not perfect, it ain't a tragedy. Next time I won't wait a decade to watch." In August 2021, director Martin Campbell said, "The film did not work, really. That's the point, and I'm partly responsible for that. I shouldn't have done it. Because with something like Bond — I love Bond, and I watched every Bond film before I ever directed it. Superhero movies are not my cup of tea, and for that reason, I shouldn't have done it." In December 2024 while promoting September 5, Sarsgaard later said while the film wasn't good, he enjoyed the experience on set including when he killed off Tim Robbins's character.