Brightest Day or Blackest Night

How am I only hearing about this now? From Blog@Newsarama:

The current edition of Production Weekly lists Warner Bros.’ Green Lantern movie as in active development (that’s not exactly news), and provides a broad description that seems to stay true to the character’s origin: “Each sector of space is protected by a Green Lantern, possessing a power ring that uses a powerful green energy to do anything within the limits of the user’s imagination and will power. When the Green Lantern assigned to this sector of space finds himself dying on planet Earth, he tells the ring to find a suitable successor. The chosen replacement, hot-shot test pilot Hal Jordan, finds himself with a new job he never expected.

I'm at once excited and nervous about the prospect of a Green Lantern movie. Anyone who's let me go on about superhero comics for more than ten minutes knows that Green Lantern was the first superhero I discovered as a kid and he remains my favorite character (especially now that his comic has such a great creative team on it), so I'd love to see a great movie with the character. I see two problems, however. First, he's a character with a very complicated mythology and I don't know that you can strip much of it out without damaging what is so cool about the character. I'd be a little disappointed if I went to see a Green Lantern movie and didn't at least get a passing reference to the Guardians of the Universe and the Green Lantern Corps. Second, there's the name. Now, I don't have a problem with the name Green Lantern, but then I've been reading about the character for a couple of decades now and am steeped in comic lore made up of characters with similarly absurd names, but when I look at it from a regular guy point of view I can see how it would be difficult to take a character seriously that's named after an inanimate object. If you're not used to the name, it just sounds kind of goofy.

The good news is the writers that are currently involved, Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim. I'm quite fond of their TV work (particularly last season's Eli Stone), and Guggenheim has done some good comic book work as well, so I'm optimistic about the script. I certainly feel better about the prospects for this version than the proposed Jack Black comedy version that was in development a couple of years ago. >shudder<