After years of stop-and-start development, HBO is finally moving forward with their Green Lantern TV series, based on the long-running DC Comics series.
Officially titled Lanterns, the series will be overseen by showrunner Chris Mundy, and co-written by Damon Lindelof and DC comics creator Tom King. No casting has been announced to date.
Here is how HBO described the premise of the show:
The series follows new recruit John Stewart and Lantern legend Hal Jordan, two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.
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DC Sttudios co-CEO James Gunn had this to say about the series:
We’re thrilled to bring this seminal DC title to HBO with Chris, Damon and Tom at the helm. John Stewart and Hal Jordan are two of DC’s most compelling characters, and LANTERNS brings them to life in an original detective story that is a foundational part of the unified DCU we’re launching next summer with ‘Superman.’
Gunn’s Superman film will feature its own Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, played by Nathan Fillion.
Green Lantern was previously an extremely unpopular big-budget feature, starring Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan. In the years after the movie flopped, Warner Bros. and DC have tinkered with numerous other Green Lantern adaptations. They announced a Green Lantern TV show way back in the fall of 2020, when Max was still known as HBO Max. That series had a different showrunner (Seth Grahame-Smith) and totally different lead Lanterns: Finn Wittrock as Guy Gardner and Jeremy Irvine as Alan Scott.
Given its expansive cast and potential as a procedural — the Green Lanterns are space cops so they could conceivably investigate a new case every single week — Lanterns should work better on TV than it did as a movie. Or at least one hopes so. Even at its absolute worst, how could it be worse than the Green Lantern film?
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