The way to go is to center it around John Stewart and import everything from the Justice League cartoons into the movies.
Green Lantern is about an Earthman in Space. It's a reverse-Superman (an alien among Earthlings). For that you need a character who to some extent fits better or feels more at home in Space among the Lanterns than he maybe does among Earth. That's why John Stewart was the ideal Green Lantern. In the Justice League, a runnng thread with him was his sense that he was becoming his job, that he maybe felt more comfortable in space than in Earth, heck he even tried to get a transfer to another sector and leave Earth for a while.
Whereas Hal Jordan is basically too Earth-centric. You can see this in the 2011 movie where most of the action is set on Earth, and that's a terrible approach and a failure. Hal Jordan is a very dated character. Hal Jordan was never a very important character as people assume
http://www.comicscube.com/2011/03/wh...ortant-as.html
In general the Green Lantern movies need to be like James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy, it has to by outer space, for outer space, of outer space. John Stewart as a character fits that mould, his most famous relationships whether it's Katma Tui or Shayera Hol are with aliens. Sinestro is primarily a Green Lantern Corps villain and not a Hal Jordan villain, and Katma Tui comes from the same planet that Sinestro does so there's a personal connection you can work between Sinestro and Stewart, far more than with Jordan. The ultimate approach should be that Green Lantern should be the center of the cosmic side. I mean make the Rann-Thanawar war into a Green Lantern story, and that way you can do the John-Shayera romance. Nobody gives a damn about Katar Hol anyway. The Justice League cartoons made Despero into a GL-centric story. More can be done on that front.
The problem with DC since Dan Didio and Geoff Johns is this attempt to make the Silver Age the one true thing. That meant that Wally West was kneecapped in favor of Barry Allen (another dull character who got a perfect sendoff) over Mark Waid's objections. The Speed-Force and all the Flash-mythos was created for Wally but in adaptations was given to Barry which makes that on some level even more galling. Still Barry Allen has had success on that TV Show whereas Hal Jordan hasn't had any of that. Shayera Hol likewise as Hawkgirl broke out and became a big character but instead of making her into a major female superheroine or anti-heroine, they instead go to the well and give Hawkman endless second chances to the point that his continuity is unreadable. And again the more second chances people give to old white relics just creates a toxic culture of fan nostalgia that makes gatekeeping happen.
It was Didio and Johns that drove me to Marvel. They are the ones as much as Zack Snyder that cost DC it's own Shared Universe on the movies. And yet there's been no punishment, no consequences. It's ridiculous.