Zack Snyder’s Justice League Concept Art Finally Brings Green Lantern to the Movie
Green Lantern’s nixed appearance in Zack Snyder’s Justice League continues to be teased with concept art.
DC Extended Universe megamovie, which he was initially unable to complete. While, for fans of Snyder, it lived up to said hype, the conversation about unrealized concepts shifted to Justice League member Green Lantern, who studio Warner Bros. insisted be cut from the reworked film. However, Snyder has been stoking interest in his unused Green Lantern concept ever since, notably with a recent reveal of concept art that sets the emerald ring-wielder’s role into context.
While the idea of the Green Lantern Corps was very much present in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, specifically its prologue, which was set around 5,000 years in the past, that usage was intended to set the stage for a present-day member to show up and our heroes: John Stewart. Indeed, amongst the major behind-the-scenes revelations about the film that have been popping up over the past few months, it had become known that Snyder secretly cast actor Wayne T. Carr for the role in the lengthy redux, and had even shot scenes. Thus, in what is just the latest tease on this front, Snyder has used his Vero to post a concept painting that essentially reveals what Carr’s Lantern was set to accomplish.
The setup of the vibrantly verdant painted image (seen in full just below,) should seem familiar to anyone who saw the Snyder Cut, since it resembles the film-ending teaser scene in which Harry Lennix’s Secretary of Defense Calvin Swanwick—revealed uniquely in what Snyder had planned to be a trilogy (at least) of Justice League films. Of course, the concept art reveals that Snyder’s original intent with this scene was to serve as a proper introduction to Carr’s John Stewart/Green Lantern, rather than Lennix’s Martian Manhunter, who had spent the film disguised as Martha Kent, setting up a slow-burn introduction.
Tellingly, Snyder’s post of the Green Lantern concept art also includes a lengthy, contextually cryptic quote from Joseph Campbell, the American author who famously identified the mythological template of genre storytelling. A key part of the age, which states, “And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act,” seems to reference HBO Max live-action Green Lantern TV series is taking shape with Finn Wittrock as Guy Gardner and Jeremy Irvine as Alan Scott, the studio still clearly wants the proverbial runway cleared on the movie side of things.
Indeed, John Stewart is a Green Lantern Corps initiate—who was initially a backup for Hal Jordan—who, upon his 1971 introduction, eventually came into his own in the annals of DC Comics. While Stewart, an important early example of a black comic book hero, was initially introduced as an architect recruited by the Corps, he would become more famously defined by a retconned backstory, in which he was a former U.S. Marine, whose effectiveness as a Lantern comes from an aggressive military-honed attitude, notably reflected in his ring-powered constructs, which typically tend to take shape as gigantic cannons mounted on his hands. Indeed, Carr would have been the very first live-action representation of the now-iconic character—at least, notwithstanding a teased scene in the final episode of a subsequent role reprisal in an Arrowverse series nipped that notion in the bud.
Despite that, Snyder is sending out clear signals to the legion of fans who helped make the Snyder Cut a reality that there’s even more to his vision than what was seen in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. This past May, he posted a set image of Carr wearing a motion capture suit standing against a green screen appropriately backlit with green lighting, thereby revealing a rough idea of how Carr’s version of the character would have looked onscreen. Shortly after that, Earth-2 set reboot film The Batman.
Regardless, Snyder’s John Stewart/Green Lantern seems to be re-whetting appetites that were seemingly satiated by the Snyder Cut. While it is highly unlikely to bear any fruit, the same was said about the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement, which has, indicatively, evolved into #RestoreTheSnyderVerse. For now, though, the concept art shall have to suffice.
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