Corona | Coming Attractions

MTV Movies Blog spoke with Chris Pine and asked him about the Green Lantern rumors. Contrary to the information that the Collider and Mania sites reported last week, the actor confirmed that he has in fact met with Green Lantern producer and the film's casting director. Pine's exact words were, "No, I had a meeting with [casting director] Pam Dixon and [executive producer] Donald De Line, but a meeting was all it was...I have not been offered squat. I do not have the part and haven't read a script."

With this new information Pine's comments do give our original March 19th scoop some weight but the actor stopped short of saying what our source told us, that an offer was made by Warner Bros. to the actor.

Two websites have checked with their sources and report back that, according to their people, there is no offer out to Chris Pine to play Green Lantern. The sites are Collider and Comics2Film/Mania, both highly regarded among their peers (and that includes Coming Attractions.) Mania states that the casting director for the movie wasn't even hired until last week and that the production isn't "even close to making an offer" to anyone for the leading role.

We checked with our source that told us an offer was out to Chris Pine and informed them of what the other sites were reporting. Our source reiterated that an offer has been made to the actor to star in the film.

Filming is scheduled to start sometime in the middle of September in Australia on Green Lantern.

A deep cover source contacted us mere moments ago to say that Warner Bros. has made an offer to Chris Pine to play Green Lantern. Pine is about to hit the big leagues when Paramount's Star Trek opens in May; he plays the new face of Captain James T. Kirk.

When our source contacted Coming Attractions they didn't know that IESB had just broken the news an hour earlier that Pine was the studio's top choice to play the emerald warrior. 10 minutes before this story started to be written on CA, Latino Review published its own story that WB had just made an offer to Pine.

We're a little late to the party but hey, secondary confirmation is good too.

While promoting his two upcoming comedies I Love You, Man and Observe and Report, producer Donald De Line also answered Coming Soon's questions about where Green Lantern is at. He dismissed earlier reports that the film's makers were looking to cast someone in the Lantern's shoes in their early 20's and instead specifically indicated that the age range for the actor that they would eventually hire would be "late 20s, early 30s."

On who the central character is in the Green Lantern movie: "Our story is the Hal Jordan origin story, but creating the character of Hal Jordan that is a real character that will resonate with the fanbase is what we need to do. You have to make him credible and somebody to care about and tell a good story, and I think if we do that, we'll be okay."

On the movie's tone: "It's going to be a series of big stakes and big action, but it absolutely has a sense of humor...I think people accept real life, even with really serious situations, with humor as part of that situation, as we experience in life, you have to have that. That's how people cope, so they've done it so well in these other movies. I think that people are absolutely ready. It doesn't have to fall on one side of the fence vs. the other."

A source privy to Latino Review has passed on the news that Ryan Gosling and Emile Hirsch have both passed on the part of playing Hal Jordan, so one of the candidates the producers are eyeing is current it-kid of the moment, Anton Yelchin. After appearing in indies like Charlie Bartlett and Alpha Dog, he's playing the teenage Kyle Reese in Terminator Salvation and the rebooted Pavel Chekov in Star Trek this summer. Yelchin turns 20 next month.

Warner Bros. has now officially announced a targeted release dat eof December 17, 2010 for its Green Lantern movie. Currently the only other film opening on the same date is Sony Pictures' big-screen adventure with The Smurfs. Yup, it's blue versus green.

While answering questions from the press concerning his new TV project Kings, Michael Green, one of the screenwriters of the GL movie, was asked what was the latest news concerning the emerald superhero movie. "Green Lantern seems to be moving ahead," the writer answered and was reported by Sci Fi Wire. "I love the material. I was fortunate enough to get to adapt something that I've loved for a long time."

Is the male star of The Notebook the frontrunner to take the oath of a Green Lantern? According to a source known to Latino Review the studio's number one choice to play the role of Hal Jordan is 27-year-old Ryan Gosling. As we mentioned, Gosling starred in The Notebook opposite Rachel McAdams. He was nominated last year for a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in Half Nelson and has also appeared in Fracture, Stay and Lars and the Real Girl.

Green Lantern producer Donald De Line spoke with the First Showing website and said that the plan is to have the film's first day of filming sometime in the spring of 2009. "It's coming together and I'm really excited about it," De Line told the site. "Hopefully we'll make it to start gate. We're really close - really close." De Line also revealed that a new draft of the screenplay had been recently received.

Comics 2 Film has discovered five pieces of concept art for the proposed Green Lantern movie housed on the website of illustrator Brian Murray. The artist explains that this quintet of pieces were created for Greg Berlanti to submit as the director's proposal to Warner Bros. to land him the GL gig. Some of the pieces have a date of February 2007 so they are from a while back but they all show Hal Jordan in the costume of the superhero.

All five of the Green Lantern pieces have been added to our Green Lantern picture gallery.

The executives in charge of Warner Bros. and their counterparts running DC Comics are now working together to iron out a master plan on how best to bring DC's pantheon of superheroes to the silver screen. A number of movies based on DC superheroes are in various stages of development including another Superman movie and long gestating projects such as Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Supermax (featuring the Green Arrow character in a prison that incarcerates supervillains) and the Justice League movie that has been shut down for an indefinate amount of time.

While members from both companies have met before when a Warner Bros. superhero movie was in production, this marks the first time that the upper echelons of both companies (each division is owned by Time Warner) have started developing an overall strategy for how best to make multiple films from the comic publisher's stable of characters. We assume that at least part of the reason for a meeting of DC/WB minds stems from the success that Marvel Studios has had in bringing its roster of superheroes to cineplexes. Marvel is in the middle of planning a series of movies such as the sequel to Iron Man, Captain America and Thor movies and an Avengers movie that would feature several of these heroes working together as part of a team.

"I was going to be capturing bad guys with green, giant prophylactics," said Jack Black to MTV Movies Blog about how close he came to portraying Green Lantern in the movie of the same name. "Some funny stuff." Well, at least that's his opinion of it.

"I really liked the script that a friend of mine wrote," Black added. “But nobody wanted to make it; it was too weird.

"It would have been a comedy, and I don’t know, maybe they didn’t want to go that way with the character...You don’t see a lot of the superheroes as comedies. Batman, Superman, Spiderman - they’re all pretty straight-up."

Warner Bros. has found someone to direct its live action Green Lantern movie and it's Greg Berlanti. Before you can ask "Who?", Berlanti is best known as a executive producer and writer on the television series Eli Stone, Dirty Sexy Money, Brothers & Sisters, Everwood and Dawson's Creek. He also wrote and directed the 2000 indie comedy The Broken Hearts Club.

Berlanti's deal, which was first reported in the pages of Variety, also includes him as a writing partner on the Green Lantern screenplay along with Marc Guggenheim and Michael Green. The former writer also works on Brothers & Sisters with Berlanti and has also penned several comics for Marvel including Wolverine, Blade and Amazing Spider-Man. Green serves as co-executive producer on NBC's Heroes and also worked on Smallville as a producer/writer.

The producer is Donald De Line (Body of Lies) and Andrew Haas will be an executive producer.

Jack Black is no longer attached to play Green Lantern. While fielding questions from Stephanie Sanchez of IESB.net at the press junket for Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, Black was asked the question if he was still involved with the movie. "Not true," replied the School of Rock actor. "Well yeah, it was true that someone wrote a script for me but I don't think that it's going to happen. Too many people were mad at the idea of me being Green Lantern."

See Black answer the question and hear his response for yourself.