Film Bites: THOR Inspires Warner To Go Mythos-Heavy With New GREEN LANTERN Trailer

I find it interesting the changes that a single movie's success can make on a marketplace. The first GREEN LANTERN trailer was clearly molded after Tony Stark in that it represented Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) as a hotshot playboy pilot who stumbles across a magic ring that gives him green armor. Had you not known the history of the Lantern then you’d have been easy to assume that the flick was a green-tinted IRON MAN knock-off. Virtually none of the outer space stuff was shown and the whole preview was cut to cash-in on what superhero was popular at that moment - I.E. Iron Man.

Future trailers for LANTERN dumped most of the relationship/playboy stuff in favor of more sci-fi stuff, but the full marketing push towards this being a uber-comic flick hadn’t occurred yet. That is, till now. This new trailer (presumably the last big one before the movie hits June 17th) is nothing but super sci-fi mythos. Hell, this trailer is basically a three minute long prequel to the movie that throws the audience straight into the “high fantasy” stuff and doesn’t look back. What you get here is the full history of the Green Lantern Corps, the Emerald Energy that fuels their abilities, the Immortals, Parallax and virtually none of the Earth stuff. I’ve heard word that most of the movie takes place on the planet Oa and this trailer seems to reinforce that pretty hard.

In other words, this trailer is taking full advantage of the fact that THOR was a box office hit. Remember how THOR didn’t show any of the Asgard stuff in the previews but 75% of the movie takes place there? Yeah, turns out that audiences actually dug that stuff more than the Earth sequences and that newfound affection has caused a shift in the marketplace. Seems like the flavor of the month now is not “dark and gritty” like THE DARK KNIGHT or “fun and fast” like IRON MAN, but “heroic and over-the-top” like THOR. Thus the reason we have a new mythos-heavy ("Thor-esque") trailer for GREEN LANTERN.

Enjoy and try not to wonder why Warner labeled this as a 3D trailer when the version available on the Net is clearly 2D.