This week, Neil Calloway is not happy with the lack of imagination when it comes to casting…
With the big news on Friday (and I’m not talking about Penguin Awareness Day), you may have missed the story about the potential casting for the forthcoming Green Lantern movie. If you did miss it, you won’t be surprised by the names that are being touted for the role.
It was reported that Tom Cruise, Jake Gyllenhaal, Armie Hammer, Bradley Cooper, Joel McHale, and Ryan Reynolds were all in contention, with James Marsden later added to the list. Now, you can take this two ways; one, it’s meaningless speculation – what football supporters would call “paper talk” when a player is linked to their club – and the second just shows the paucity of ideas in Hollywood. You could put my mother in the room and she’d come up with those names. In fact, she’d probably come up with better.
Those names, give or take, are probably linked to every male role in Hollywood; they only have one thing in common, and that is that they appear in successful films or TV shows. Cruise would be close to 60 by the time the movie came out, a patently ridiculous age for him to be playing a superhero (especially if it’s going to be an origin story).
The inclusion of Reynolds on the list is particularly revealing; yes, he’s appeared in the role before, but 2011’s Green Lantern movie was less than successful and he’s been critical of it since; whichever studio exec put him on the list knows the facts about everything but the truth about nothing.
Like publishing, like the music industry, Hollywood is incredibly faddish; superhero movies are doing well, so they make more of them, and it’s also incredibly risk averse when it comes to casting; it doesn’t matter if someone is wildly inappropriate for a role, if they can make a movie successful, they’re in (hence 5’7” Tom Cruise playing the 6’5” Jack Reacher). It works with directors too; why do you think J.J. Abrams helmed both the Star Trek reboot and The Force Awakens? Emilia Clarke was a success in Game of Thrones so they threw her into both the execrable Terminator Genisys and the new Han Solo movie. Of course, give them a few duds and they’re soon off the A-list and sliding down the spiral towards straight-to-video Christian movies and commercials for cat litter.
Of course, this story could be less about the lack of imagination when it comes to casting and more about a movie news site desperate for clicks and throwing out a bunch of names that sound like they could plausibly be linked to the role. In reality, it’s probably both.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
Originally published January 22, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
