Tim Robbins Cast for GL and GL Animated? ~ The Blog of OA

2/9/10

Tim Robbins Cast for GL and GL Animated?

2/09/2010

Last night on The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog posted news that Oscar winning actor Tim Robbins has been cast in the Green Lantern live action film. The film begins shooting next month in New Orleans, where it has been reported that over two hundred people are constructing sets as we speak amidst all the post-Super Bowl hoopla.

Robbins, who won his Academy Award for "Mystic River", will be playing Senator Hammond, the disapproving father of Hector Hammond. Hector is being playing by Peter Sarsgaard and will be one of two main villains in the film if the plot has stayed consistent with the first draft of the script that was leaked on the Internet. Hector Hammond is of course destined to be mutated into a being with a genius intellect and highly evolved telepathic and telekinetic powers to the point that he no longer needs to speak, choosing to converse with the powers of his mind.

There are still several other roles to be filled that we should be hearing announcements about very soon, including Martin Jordan, Kilowog, Abin Sur, Tomar Re and the Guardians. Given the short time span before filming begins I imagine that director Martin Campbell is furiously working on getting these casting decisions resolved as the first day of filming looms on the horizon.

In other news, there is a rumor floating about that Warner Brothers is preparing a CG Green Lantern animated series for 2011 produced by none other than Bruce Timm. What little information about the show comes from a source not linked with the animation department, but from toy marketing. Here's how the story goes:

Someone who works in the toy industry posted on the Action Figure Insider forums that WB has three new animated series in the works for Cartoon Network and that those shows were being pitched to companies like Mattel, Bandai, and Hasbro for the tie-in toys. The three shows were a new Scooby Doo show, a Young Justice show, and the CG Green Lantern show.

The poster claims to have also seen five minutes of footage from the GL show that s/he says is "stunning" and featured Hal Jordan in space. The poster also also gave the roster for the propsed Young Justice show and since then a couple of concept art pieces popped up supporting some of the claims. Several of the posts and the art were removed from the sites they originally appeared on, but not before people grabbed copies of them.

No one knows exactly how much credibility there is to the the statements, however the art leaks add some weight to it being true. Warner Brothers is said to be making some big announcements in the next few weeks including news on DC Entertainment, so perhaps we'll see some sort of official word coming out of that. If true, I certainly hope that the show is along the lines of the previous Timmverse in terms of tone.

It wouldn't be the frist time that Warner Brothers worked on a Green Lantern animated series. Years ago Bruce Timm and company pitched the idea to WB complete with some character designs that had been worked up. That show was to be more a light affair similar to what we see in the "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" animated series. WB thankfully shot that idea down, but the character designs were later reused for the "Duck Dodgers" episode "The Green Loontern" that can be found on the bluray edition of "Green Lantern: First Flight".