As a comic book character, Green Lantern has always been pretty silly.
As such, Green Lantern has been famously difficult to adapt into live-action. A 2011 Green Lantern film starring Ryan Reynolds was so notorious that Reynolds himself has repeatedly mocked it. Zack Snyder had Green Lantern briefly appear in a Justice League ancient battle flashback, but Warner Bros. blocked the director from introducing the character into the present day. A film titled Green Lantern Corps was announced for the DC Extended Universe in 2014, but after several top creatives tried to crack the script (including David S. Goyer, Geoff Johns and Christopher McQuarrie), the effort was dropped. The character was beginning to seem like he was destined to be relegated to Six Flags amusement parks and animated titles (where the character has appeared quite often).
Now here comes HBO‘s Lanterns, which is taking a very grounded approach to the material. “It’s a very grounded, real show,” DC Studios co-chief James Gunn said about Lanterns last year. “It’s taking this outlandish concept of space cops with magic rings and putting it in as close to reality as it can possibly be.”
Lanterns is so grounded, in fact, that the teaser trailer was criticized right out of the gate for seemingly like it had little to do with Green Lantern at all. The series features two Green Lantern Corps characters: Kyle Chandler as former U.S. Air Force test pilot turned galactic hero Hal Jordan, who is training Aaron Pierre, who plays fan-favorite John Stewart. The trailer shows the duo investigating a murder in Nebraska, “which leads them to darker mysteries and reckonings.”
Fans griped the footage (below) looked rather dour and lacked, well, any green in it. Some said the show looked more like a True Detective wannabe than a superhero story (the showrunner, Chris Mundy, also worked on True Detective: The Night Country). Given this is merely a teaser trailer, however, and is presumably holding off showing much of what’s to come in the show, and HBO wishes to draw in a broad audience, the choices made sense on paper. Another gripe was that the leads seemed to dislike each other intensely, and therefore didn’t seem particularly likable for the audience, though, again, this is probably also an early-in-the-season creative move.
The trailer response has some fans recirculating a year-old comment made by the show’s co-creator and executive producer, Damon Lindelof — who has plenty of experience with receiving online love (Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen) and online backlash (Prometheus, Lost again). Lindelof said jokingly, on the Lovett or Leave It podcast: “It’s called Lanterns, because we all agreed that the ‘Green’ was stupid, so now it’s just Lanterns.”
Now — and I realize this is burying the lede a bit, but all this context is helpful to have up front — a Green Lantern comic writer is slamming Lindelof.
Grant Morrison wrote an acclaimed run of The Green Lantern that was published from 2018 to 2021, and fumed on Substack: “TV writer/producer Damon Lindelof’s comments notwithstanding, the ‘Green’ in ‘Green Lantern(s)’ is not ‘stupid.’ Why does a writer attach himself to this kind of narrative if he thinks it’s fundamentally ‘stupid’? You don’t hand CSI scripts to patronising writers who condemn forensics experts and their haircuts as ‘stupid’, so why hire people who are ashamed and in denial about the comic book material they’ve been assigned to develop? Why don’t they turn down jobs they’re not suited for? It’s not like he needs the money, and Lindelof has proven that he can come up with his own ideas. What is this jockish dismissal of superhero conventions intended to prove anyway? Does Lindelof imagine it makes him seem less nerdy? It’s a bit too late for that, so what’s it all about? The only people who give a fuck about the Lanterns TV series are Green Lantern fans. Why alienate them at the start? That feels more like ‘stupid.’”
“The show might even be good,” he added. “But how much better could this stuff be if studios were willing to hire the right people for the job instead of phoning their embarrassed friends to water the source material down?”
Of course, if you’re not a Green Lantern fan, everything about this probably sounds a bit stupid. Given Gunn has been off to a strong start at DC, and Lindelof has won a trio of Emmys and always does interesting work (even if it’s not your cup of tea), it would be wise to give them the benefit of the doubt. But to Morrison’s point, fandoms are fickle and easily offended and one alienates them at one’s own risk
Here’s the teaser trailer. Lanterns will released in August. HBO/Lindelof had no immediate comment.
