James Gunn may not have been completely honest with his audience when he announced the plans for DC’s rebooted Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters. What else can explain the new Lanterns series helmed by HBO, with a too-good-to-be-true storyline, that has zero connection to the overarching DC Universe?
Carefully curated by the creative minds behind groundbreaking series like True Detective, Slow Horses, Ozark, Lost, and Watchmen, the new HBO drama will root the Green Lantern franchise in the grittiest of realities while also taking DC to heights never achieved before.
James Gunn sets Lanterns in the True Detective world
DC has been going through a momentous shift in history as its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, flounders in every which way to stay afloat – barely. But under David Zaslav’s watchful eye, DC Studios chief James Gunn tinkers away with 100-year-old legacy characters and IPs that will provide the basis for the interconnected live-action DC Cinematic Universe.
Among them lie the Green Lanterns – space cops entrusted with great magical power who fight for justice across the vast span of the universe. However, Gunn plays into the age-old proverbial “We’re not in Kansas anymore” by bringing two of DC’s greatest Lanterns right into the heartland of Nebraska.
The irony hardly ends there, as Lanterns takes a page right out of True Detective‘s playbook. Widely considered one of the greatest pulp detective dramas of the century, True Detective (and Gary Oldman’s Slow Horses) will now serve as a storyboard and inspiration for the DC series.
To ensure DC gets it right this time around (as compared to 2011’s catastrophic disaster), Gunn employed Chris Mundy (Ozark, True Detective) as the series writer and showrunner, who wants to “turn [the comic adaptation] into a layered, human HBO drama.” Meanwhile, Slow Horses director James Hawes is set to helm the first two episodes.
Is James Gunn setting Lanterns up for failure?
For a filmmaker who repeatedly and confidently proclaimed The Flash as one of the greatest comic book movies of all time, James Gunn is making some surprisingly bold and radical choices – Lanterns being the latest example. But after losing the faith and confidence of the fans due to recent DC debacles, every word that comes from Gunn needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Starring Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan, the veteran Lantern on the verge of retirement, and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, the one who will take up the mantle, Lanterns sheds the superhero suits for civvies as the pair investigates a murder in Nebraska. As they get pulled deeper into the swirl of secrets, darker mysteries unfold, and the Lanterns face a reckoning of their own.
While the storyline may sound like every crime drama junkie’s wet dream, Chris Mundy, writer and showrunner, revealed something that could be seen as a major red flag regarding James Gunn’s future plans for DCU. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Mundy claimed:
It’s a series that explores who these guys are when they’re on the job and when they’re out of uniform. It’s designed to be accessible for people who don’t know the mythology, but hopefully really satisfying for people that know it backwards and forwards. We’re not part of a larger storytelling plan right now. Season one is designed to be its own, complete season of television that, hopefully, will become many seasons of television.
Fashioned as a pulpy prestige drama with the signature tonal theme that permeates every HBO drama, Lanterns may exist best outside the broader umbrella of Gunn’s DCU. Following in the footsteps of Robert Pattinson’s The Batman, HBO’s Lanterns can be free to explore its tonally darker theme for as many seasons as Gunn can sanction without affecting the DCU timeline.
With 8 episodes in its debut season, Lanterns is slated to premiere on HBO and Max in early 2026.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
