UPDATE, September 3: We can now see what the expensive version was going to look like. A creature designer has shared Kilowog and Tomar-Re concept art from the canceled series, built as alien Lanterns for a show set in space.
UPDATE, September 2: The people making it keep proving the point. A Lanterns star tied Episode 3 to Kamala Harris, and DC’s own podcast host is telling fans Hal Jordan is “canonically” racist.
UPDATE, August 31: Episode 3 went all-in. Our review called “OutKast” embarrassing, complete garbage, the fan backlash erupted, and the episode’s writer had already studied the woke Watchmen backlash, saying a million haters is OK.
UPDATE, August 23: Episode 2 keeps the affair going and drops four “white men” mentions in one scene, with Hal Jordan reduced to John Stewart’s “white man”. The same episode also goes full frontal with naked alien corpses.
UPDATE, August 20: The ratings are in: 9.3 million viewers in three days, DC’s biggest HBO Max series premiere, and the credit isn’t Gunn’s.
UPDATE, August 20: Lanterns also plants its story in Taylor Sheridan country and mocks the exact audience Paramount is banking on.
James Gunn’s Lanterns looks less like a new DCU idea and more like the HBO Green Lantern version Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim refused to make, with added woke elements courtesy Damon Lindelof and Tom King.
Guggenheim recently revealed that HBO kept pushing Berlanti’s team toward a cheaper version, “True Detective with power rings.”
Years later, Gunn announced Lanterns with a nearly identical sales pitch.
My insiders say the overlap goes further.
Berlanti and Guggenheim planned to kill off Alan Scott, jump across different decades, and focus on different Green Lanterns.
Gunn and company killed off Hal Jordan instead. The series jumps from 1996 to 2016 to 2026.
Sound familiar?
HBO wanted “True Detective with power rings” before Gunn
Berlanti had been developing a Green Lantern series for HBO Max since 2019. Marc Guggenheim and Seth Grahame-Smith worked with him, and the team completed eight scripts.
HBO executives balked at the cost of the larger space-based series and kept pushing a grounded detective format.
“We kept getting these notes saying they want True Detective with power rings,” Guggenheim recently said.
Berlanti’s team did not want to make that show.
Gunn later announced nearly the same concept as a major part of his “Gods and Monsters ” slate, with Hal Jordan and John Stewart investigating a dark mystery in the American heartland.
As I previously reported, the grounded direction came from HBO years before Gunn took over DC Studios. You can read the full background in my report on how Lanterns came from an old HBO note.
Berlanti’s Green Lantern series killed Alan Scott
My insiders say Alan Scott was the Green Lantern who died in Berlanti and Guggenheim’s pitch.
The choice fit the structure they were building. Alan Scott is DC’s original Golden Age Green Lantern, and the series was going to move across different decades while focusing on different Green Lanterns.
Instead of locking the story to one time period and one lead, the earlier show would use Green Lantern history as part of the main story.
HBO did not move forward with that version. Berlanti’s team walked rather than turn it into the cheaper grounded detective show the network wanted.
Gunn’s Lanterns killed Hal Jordan instead
Lanterns has now killed Hal Jordan on-screen.
The character changed, but the move remained: kill a major established Green Lantern and make his death a defining part of a story involving another generation of Lanterns.
One version killed the Golden Age Green Lantern. Gunn’s version killed the Silver Age Green Lantern.
Hal Jordan’s death was confirmed in the HBO premiere, following what my insiders previously told me. Read more in my report on Hal Jordan’s death in Lanterns.
The generational Green Lantern structure also sounds familiar
Berlanti and Guggenheim’s series was going to jump across different decades and focus on different Green Lanterns.
Gunn’s series centers an older Hal Jordan and a younger John Stewart while using the history of the Green Lanterns as part of its mystery.
The final HBO series may not follow the earlier scripts beat for beat, but it uses the same generational machinery. An established Lantern dies. Another Lantern carries the story forward. The mystery reaches into the past and the episodes flashback through different timelines.
Green Lantern has always had a legacy built into the comics, so none of these ideas belong to one writer. However, the HBO note, the dead veteran Lantern, and the multi-generation structure all existed in the earlier development process.
And the media still treated the finished Lanterns concept as proof of Gunn’s grand DCU vision.
Lanterns fuels more woke James Gunn DCU divisiveness
Lanterns also continues to build on James Gunn’s woke DCU divisiveness. Recall what Gunn did with Peacemaker, which led to nearly half the audience bailing and a series cancellation. Just as Gunn did with Peacemaker and Creature Commandos, his third HBO Max series does more of the same.
The backlash surrounding Lanterns is not limited to Hal Jordan’s death. The series is also taking heat for what it does to John Stewart.
For many fans, John remains the Green Lantern they know best from the Justice League animated series. He was disciplined, serious, dependable, and carried himself like the former Marine he was.
The live-action version goes in another direction.
John is presented as loose-lipped, emotionally damaged, and reckless. He sleeps with an older woman he meets at a bar, later learns she is married, and then receives a bizarre pass from her husband. The man even tells him, “Always nice to eat off another man’s grill.”
Some viewers are already calling the scene another example of the humiliation and cuckold humor that keeps showing up in Gunn’s superhero projects.
Instead of introducing John Stewart as one of DC’s strongest and most respected heroes, Lanterns introduces him as the guy sleeping with another man’s wife.
Hal does not fare much better.
He is portrayed as a grumpy, broken-down veteran who seems closer to a defeated former hero than the fearless test pilot fans expected.
At one point, Hal interrogates a racist extraterrestrial and gets him to reveal information through Obama trivia.
The series also lectures Hal for caring about football while people are starving and the environment is falling apart.
John is made a vegan (mentioned twice), while much of the dialogue leans on trauma, profanity, and political commentary instead of showing either man acting like a Green Lantern.
For viewers already tired of Hollywood turning established male heroes into miserable failures, Lanterns checks every box.
The heroes fight each other. The action takes a back seat to talking. Social commentary replaces a clear comic book villain. F-bombs are used as a cheap substitute for emotion, while smaller supporting characters repeatedly lecture or humiliate the leads.
The 2016 setting adds another layer.
Armed rural men (“militia” is named) gather to respond to an apparent alien threat during the same year Donald Trump was elected, while John Stewart becomes the strong black hero positioned against them. John also happens to have slept with their leader’s wife.
Instead of giving fans a cosmic Green Lantern story, HBO stripped the concept down to angry, dumb locals, damaged heroes, political symbolism, and a street-level mystery.
Hal and John feel less like members of an intergalactic police force and more like broken men trapped inside another Hollywood culture-war drama.
The result is more of the divisiveness that has followed Gunn’s DC projects.
Fans waited years to see Hal Jordan and John Stewart together in live action. Lanterns gives them an old white dude Hal marked for death and a John Stewart many longtime fans barely recognize.
HBO may have finally gotten its cheaper “True Detective with power rings” concept. Green Lantern fans got two more heroes rewritten to fit it.
SnyderVerse Green Lantern Corps: Lethal Weapon in space
Warner Bros. previously had another option on the table with the planned Green Lantern Corps movie, described as “Lethal Weapon in space,” with veteran Hal Jordan and younger John Stewart, set during the SnyderVerse.
Instead, HBO eventually got its grounded version, and Gunn got the credit for the pitch.
A separate, unconfirmed Man of Tomorrow claim
My insiders also passed along one separate claim about Man of Tomorrow: “Supposedly James Gunn is using elements of Chris McQuarrie’s pitch for Man of Steel 2, including Brainiac and Green Lantern.”
McQuarrie previously confirmed that his Superman and Green Lantern pitches were connected.
He said the two heroes had similarities that could create major conflict and an “universe-expanding resolution.”
More background is available in my report on McQuarrie’s scrapped Superman and Green Lantern plans.
The rejected HBO pitch became Gunn’s vision
Lanterns remains the clearer story.
HBO pushed Berlanti and Guggenheim toward “True Detective with power rings.” Their version killed Alan Scott and moved across different decades with different Green Lanterns. They walked away.
Gunn arrived later with the same grounded direction, killed Hal Jordan, and used another story built around Green Lantern generations.
It was sold as a fresh DCU vision.
It looks more like the rejected HBO version, rehashed under a new regime, and woke to boot.
