If audiences were easy enough to puzzle out, then every solidly executed premise would be a big hit. Unfortunately, that's not the case much of the time.

I'd also argue that there are degrees to the fantastic that people are willing to accept, and that's what Green Lantern would be up against. Audiences accepted Chewbacca... would they have accepted him in spandex speaking English? Laser swords coming out of a large hilt was fine, would moving laser arms with hands on the ends of them coming out of a ring be accepted just as easily?

Finally, there's the risk of the audience rejecting a mixing of genres... As much as I hate that they do, the wider audience tends to react negatively to the practice of combining multiple genres into something new. Green Lantern is clearly a mix of super-hero and sci-fi, and elements of the superhero bit contradict what people believe should happen in a sci-fi yarn. People fly without ships through space. For all of it's outlandish ideas, nobody in Star Wars does that... it sticks within what people comfortably expect from sci-fi. Nobody breathes in the vacuum (people seem to be fine with the idea that planets have breathable atmosphere, but not space itself.) Nobody up and flies without obvious (and sizeable) technology.

Even Superman has been careful in this regard not to play up the sci-fi aspects and mix genres too far in his movies. For whatever reason, sending Supes out into space seems to break a lot of people's levels of disbelief, including that of my ex-wife, Cheryl. She didn't care for any superhero story that took the characters into space. Most people have to be reminded that Superman is an alien, even if they know it. But then, look how even his origin downplays the sci-fi angle... There are no space-ships beyond the very geological one that sends the baby to Earth. No Star Destroyers orbit the planet. No laser fights take place. It's very much it's own thing, to the point that people don't think of it as Sci-fi.

That's what will be the trick of a Green Lantern flick if it wants to include all of the stuff hinted at in this trailer. It'll have to make those two genres blend in a way that audiences accept without thinking about it. It also may have to pick its battles, and leave out the chipmunk lantern, or that "nothing but a face" guy. And it will have to find the right balance of "making big glowing things out of light" that people will actually accept.

As the idea stands, I'm not terribly surprised that the studio's initial thoughts were to make it as a "Men in Black" style comedy. Here's hoping they can instead figure out how to make the Green Lantern that fans want to see.