Mike Scott, writing for the Time-Picayune, describes how a New Orleans studio is in negotiations to be the shooting location for the new Green Lantern film. The exchange rate of the US dollar has hit the financial advantage of filming in Australia which is where Green Lantern was going to film and was where Superman Returns was filmed.
Towards the end of Scott’s article he states that,
Green Lantern is expected to be the first in a trilogy of films focusing on D.C.’s Justice League heroes – the others being The Flash and Wonder Woman – before uniting all three with fellow League members Batman, Superman and Aquaman for a Justice League movie.
We’ve known that the three character films have been in the works for a while with various writers and directors being shuffled on and off staff and we obviously know about the abandoned Justice League film. The interesting information here is the strategy of spinning the individual films towards an eventual JLA film, similar to Marvel’s approach with the Iron Man, Hulk, and Avengers films.
This may just be the Scott over stating the current situation (he doesn’t name or mention a source for that particular rumour), however, there is a different rumour about casting for Green Lantern. It might feature a Superman cameo, albeit a rather low key one.
The Flash movie is said to be still progressing. Director Charles Rovin has pushed for a Flash film at WB, but he recently told IGN that,
“I was involved at one point with The Flash,” Roven informed us. “And Warner Bros. came to me and said, ‘The work that you’ve been doing hasn’t yet resulted in something that any of us, including the filmmaking team, feel could be greenlit as a movie. We’re trying to accomplish something that takes into account the entire, rich DC character world, and we’d like to pull it back. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to be a part of it. We just want to take a different kind of approach. Do you mind if we try that?’”
The emphasis is mine. If Superman does cameo in Green Lantern and if Roven is correct about the “rich DC character world” it could signal that Warner Bros. are seriously thinking about producing films in an integrated universe and that would certainly make a Justice League film more probable. And this all feeds into DC Entertainment which was created around DC Comics just so that it could leverage this type of movie deals. Nevertheless, I suspect that we’ll have to wait to see how successful Green Lantern will be before DCE’s strategy for future films is revealed.
[Via MTV's Splashpage]