50 Fun Facts About Green Lantern

Who plays Hal Jordan in the 2011 Green Lantern film?

Ryan Reynolds has joked about the part ever since: in a Deadpool 2 credits scene his time-travelling hero shoots the actor just as he finishes reading the Green Lantern script.

What is Hal Jordan's job when the ring finds him?

Test pilot: he flies for Ferris Aircraft, where Carol Ferris, the executive who hired him, soon becomes his long-running love interest as well as his boss.

Which dying alien Green Lantern passes his ring to Hal?

Abin Sur, mortally wounded, crash-lands on Earth and orders his ring to find a worthy successor; it picks Hal and carries him bodily to the wreck.

Which planet is headquarters of the Green Lantern Corps?

Oa is the base of the Guardians, the small blue-skinned immortals who founded the Corps and carved the universe into sectors for its members to patrol.

Finish the Green Lantern oath: 'In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my' what?

Sight: the oath runs on to 'beware my power, Green Lantern's light', and a Lantern recites it while recharging the ring at a lantern-shaped battery.

Which emotion powers the Green Lantern rings?

Willpower: the ring turns thought into solid green light, so it can build anything its wearer imagines, but only for as long as their resolve holds.

In the 2011 film Green Lantern, a Guardian who tried to master a forbidden energy became which world-devouring villain?

Parallax is a fallen Guardian in the film; in the comics it is an ancient entity that once took over Hal Jordan's own mind and sent him on a rampage against the Corps.

Who plays Sinestro, Hal Jordan's stern mentor, in the 2011 film Green Lantern?

Mark Strong kept the pencil moustache and widow's peak of the comics, a look the character's creators are said to have borrowed from the actor David Niven.

What does Sinestro do in the mid-credits scene of the 2011 film Green Lantern?

He puts on the yellow ring and his green suit turns yellow with it, setting up a villain's turn for a sequel that was never made.

Who plays Hector Hammond, the scientist whose head swells grotesquely, in the 2011 film Green Lantern?

Peter Sarsgaard's Hammond is infected while examining a dead alien and gains mind powers at the cost of his sanity, turning on his own father, a senator played by Tim Robbins.

Who plays aircraft executive Carol Ferris in the 2011 film Green Lantern?

Blake Lively's Carol Ferris is more than a love interest in the comics, where an alien gem turns her into the villain Star Sapphire and sets her against Hal.

Which Oscar winner voices the bird-like Lantern Tomar-Re in the 2011 film Green Lantern?

Geoffrey Rush said the artwork won him over: having voiced an owl and a pelican, he thought he could improve on them as a creature half bird, half fish and part lizard.

Who voices the drill-sergeant Lantern Kilowog in the 2011 film Green Lantern?

Michael Clarke Duncan, the Oscar-nominated giant of The Green Mile, voiced the Corps' hulking trainer; in the comics the pug-faced Kilowog went on to join the Justice League.

Which superhero-film director plays engineer Tom Kalmaku in the 2011 film Green Lantern?

Taika Waititi was a New Zealand filmmaker taking a small part as Hal's friend; within a decade he had directed Thor: Ragnarok and won an Oscar.

Who plays government agent Amanda Waller in the 2011 film Green Lantern?

Angela Bassett joined nine days after shooting had begun and was the big screen's first live-action Waller, five years before Viola Davis took the role in Suicide Squad.

Who directed Green Lantern (2011)?

Martin Campbell had relaunched James Bond with Casino Royale, but later said superhero films were never his cup of tea and that he should not have taken the job.

Which writer-director, hired for Green Lantern in 2007, later said he had 'nothing to do with the finished product'?

Greg Berlanti was fired as both writer and director yet kept his name on the film, and said he went on being blamed for a script that was never shot as he wrote it.

Which comedian was to star in a 2004 action-comedy version of Green Lantern scripted by Robert Smigel?

Jack Black was to play a lazy goof wholly unfit to be a hero, but Warner Bros. dropped the comedy once word of it met scorn from fans online.

Which US city doubled for Coast City when the 2011 film Green Lantern was shot?

New Orleans stood in for Hal Jordan's Californian home town only after a plan to make the film at Fox Studios in Sydney was dropped and the shoot moved to Louisiana.

Which Looney Tunes star ended up with Hal Jordan's ring after a dry-cleaning mix-up in a 2003 cartoon?

Daffy Duck became 'the Green Loontern' in an episode of Duck Dodgers, a spoof that nonetheless treated the Corps and its best-loved members with real affection.

Green Lantern opened at number one in June 2011, then lost the top spot a week later to which Pixar sequel?

Cars 2 took the weekend as Green Lantern's takings fell 66 per cent, dropping it to third place behind the comedy Bad Teacher as well.

DC's studio chiefs pitched the 2026 HBO series Lanterns as a Green Lantern story in the style of which crime drama?

True Detective was the stated model: Lanterns sends two Green Lanterns to investigate a murder in small-town Nebraska, a case on Earth that opens onto a far larger mystery.

Who composed the score for the 2011 film Green Lantern?

James Newton Howard had scored a DC hero before: Hans Zimmer, hired for Batman Begins, asked the director whether his old friend could share the job, and the pair wrote The Dark Knight together too.

Mogo, one of the strangest members of the Green Lantern Corps, first seen in a 1985 Alan Moore story, is what?

A living planet: Mogo shows its allegiance by growing a belt of foliage around its equator in the shape of the Corps' lantern symbol, and its first story was titled 'Mogo Doesn't Socialize'.

Which film replaced Green Lantern as the launch of DC's shared film universe?

Man of Steel took over the job in 2013, after Green Lantern's poor reviews and thin takings sank the plan to build a shared universe on Hal Jordan.

What was the job of Alan Scott, the original 1940 Green Lantern, before a magic lantern spoke to him?

Railroad engineer: after a train wreck at a collapsed bridge, the flame in a green lantern told him how to make a ring from the lantern's metal.

Which material was the one weakness of the original 1940s Green Lantern's ring?

Wood beat the ring from the start: in his first adventure a crook simply clubbed him, and a villain called the Sportsmaster later armed himself with bats and mallets.

Which editor reinvented Green Lantern as science-fiction hero Hal Jordan in 1959?

Julius Schwartz kept the name, the ring and the lantern but threw out the magic, making his new hero one officer in a whole corps of space police.

Hal Jordan's original look was modelled by artist Gil Kane on which actor?

Paul Newman had once been Gil Kane's neighbour, and the artist gave his cocky new hero the film star's face and easy charm.

Which Green Lantern, a high-profile African-American superhero, was originally chosen as Hal's alternate?

John Stewart refuses to wear a mask, and as a trained architect he is said to build his ring creations from the inside out, down to the last nut and bolt.

Which 1990s Green Lantern was a struggling artist whose constructs were unusually elaborate?

Kyle Rayner was handed the last working ring by a Guardian who told him only 'You will have to do'; his creators named him after Kyle Reese in The Terminator.

Which Green Lantern is a Lebanese-American from Dearborn, Michigan, with a rare gift for glimpsing the future?

Simon Baz at first carried a pistol alongside his ring because he did not trust an alien weapon he did not yet understand; the Arabic tattoo on his forearm means 'courage'.

Jessica Cruz was originally host to a ring that chose people who had succumbed to what?

Fear is what drew the evil Ring of Volthoom to her, where a Green Lantern's ring seeks those who master it; she broke its hold and earned a place in the Corps.

Which science-fiction novelist wrote the famous Green Lantern oath for the 1940s comic?

Alfred Bester, who went on to write The Stars My Destination, scripted Green Lantern in the 1940s and gave the hero the rhyming vow that was later revived for Hal Jordan.

Which hero became Hal Jordan's co-star from issue #76 of his comic in 1970, as the pair crossed America confronting real issues?

Green Arrow was recast as a hot-tempered radical who spent the run needling the law-and-order Lantern; the stories won awards but never sold, and were cancelled in 1972.

What did DC rename Alan Scott between 1995 and 2003 to distinguish him from newer Lanterns?

Sentinel was his codename while he channelled his power through glowing hands instead of a ring; he took back both the ring and the old name in 2003.

After turning villain and dying, Hal Jordan returned as which supernatural DC entity?

The Spectre, DC's spirit of vengeance, took Hal as its human host after he died reigniting the Sun, and he tried to turn its mission from punishment to redemption.

Which 2007 storyline by Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver first revealed power rings of many colours?

Sinestro Corps War was the middle of a trilogy that began with Rebirth and ended with Blackest Night, and sold so well that several issues went back to press.

Which brute rose from a swamp to become one of Alan Scott's great Golden Age enemies?

Solomon Grundy takes his name from the nursery rhyme about a man born on a Monday and buried on a Sunday, and in the comics he keeps dying and coming back.

In 1940 the original Green Lantern joined Hawkman and Doctor Fate to found which first team of comic-book superheroes?

The Justice Society of America gathered eight heroes for its first meeting, yet Superman and Batman, DC's two biggest stars, were only honorary members.

Political writers' 'Green Lantern theory' pokes fun at inflated faith in the powers of which office-holder?

The US president: blogger Matthew Yglesias coined the phrase in 2006 for hawkish faith in American military power, and political scientist Brendan Nyhan turned it on the presidency in 2009.

Which Marvel character is a pastiche of Green Lantern?

Doctor Spectrum appeared when writer Roy Thomas gave the Avengers a team of thinly disguised Justice Leaguers to fight, with a glowing Power Prism standing in for the ring.

Which hot-headed Green Lantern does Nathan Fillion play in the 2025 film Superman?

Guy Gardner is the Corps' loudmouth; in the comics he missed being Earth's first Lantern only because the dying alien's ring found Hal Jordan a little nearer.

Which emotion fuels the Red Lantern Corps, the army founded by the alien Atrocitus?

Rage powers the Red Lanterns, one of several rival corps tied to a colour and an emotion; Atrocitus founded it to avenge his family, killed when the Guardians' robot police ran amok.

How does Hal Jordan destroy the villain of the 2011 film Green Lantern?

He lures it into the Sun's gravity, which drags the creature in and burns it up; the effort leaves him unconscious in space until Sinestro, Kilowog and Tomar-Re catch him.

Artist Martin Nodell created the original Green Lantern in 1940 with which writer, one of Batman's earliest scripters?

Bill Finger scripted the first Green Lantern stories a year after helping to shape Batman, work for which DC gave him no official credit until 2015.

Hal Jordan debuted in 1959 in Showcase, the try-out comic that had launched the Silver Age by reviving which hero?

The Flash returned with a new costume and identity in Showcase #4 in 1956, and the success of that relaunch is why Green Lantern got the same treatment three years later.

How often did Alan Scott's magic ring have to be recharged by touching the lantern?

Every 24 hours the ring had to be touched to the green lantern to renew its charge, a rule the 1959 Hal Jordan version kept, together with the oath spoken each time.

In the 1971 story 'Snowbirds Don't Fly', which teenage sidekick is revealed to be a heroin addict?

Speedy was drawn for the cover about to inject; the editor first turned it down because the Comics Code Authority would not approve it, and the story ran only after the Code was revised in 1971.

Who plays the veteran Hal Jordan in the 2026 HBO series Lanterns?

Kyle Chandler was cast in October 2024 as an older Hal Jordan who is breaking in a new recruit, chosen for the dry wit the showrunner wanted in the part.