Like so many other actors and filmmakers who rose up the Hollywood ranks with smaller-budgeted films, Seth Rogen was also offered the opportunity to work on a superhero project after delivering a string of hits for Sony. The project was a reboot of the cult classic television series The Green Hornet, which ran for only one season in the 1960s, at around the same time as the classic Adam West and Burt Ward Batman show. Rogen reunited with his longtime partner-in-crime, Evan Goldberg, to write the project. But the director was someone who hadn’t worked on a budget this big before. The Green Hornet ultimately underperformed at the box office, failing to launch the franchise it was intended to start. The movie is set to leave Netflix U.K. at the end of the month, so this is your last chance to check it out if you haven’t already.
Rogen later admitted that the film’s budget, which was reportedly as high as $120 million, was simply too large for him to be given the kind of creative freedom that he was used to. He also said that director Michel Gondry, best known for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was perhaps a little lost at sea working on such a scale. On Marc Maron‘s podcast, Rogen said, “While we were making it, it was a f**king nightmare. And Gondry, the director, is wonderful at smaller-scale stuff, but I think he did not mesh well with [a blockbuster film]. It was his first movie with more than a $20 million dollar budget, and this was a $120 million dollar budget. And we had never made an action movie; he had never made an action movie. And if there is one thing I look back on like, ‘What was the problem there?’ It was just the budget.”
The Green Hornet also featured Cameron Diaz, Jay Chou, and Christoph Waltz, who’d only recently broken out with Inglourious Basterds, for which he won an Oscar. The movie grossed a little under $230 million at the worldwide box office, which means that it didn’t quite break even. By comparison, Rogen’s small-budget comedies were doing around the same level of business at the time, at a fraction of the cost. The Green Hornet earned mixed reviews, although Rogen attested that it tested higher than any movie he’d been a part of previously.
Working on ‘The Green Hornet’ May Have Given Rogen Inspiration for ‘The Studio’
The movie is currently sitting at a 43% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “It’s sporadically entertaining, but The Green Hornet never approaches the surreal heights suggested by a Michel Gondry/Seth Rogen collaboration.” If nothing else, Rogen and Goldberg probably got a lot of inspiration for their hit comedy series The Studio, which recently swept the Emmys. In the Maron interview, he said, “No one looks at the storyboards. What we spent, like literally $50 million dollars on, no one checks out. And that’s what’s crazy. The way the money was spent and the way the money is spent on a lot of these movies is crazy.”
The Green Hornet will leave Netflix U.K. at the end of this month. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
- Release Date
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January 14, 2011
- Runtime
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119 Minutes
