Update 9/4: The premiere week was the peak on one scoreboard â Samba TV had Lanterns at No. 2 in America out of the gate, then dropped it to No. 4 in week two.
Update 9/3: The 9.3 million held and then some. Episode 3 drew 10 million viewers worldwide, a series high, and HBO Max says the premiere has now passed 20 million.
Update 8/27: The retention answer is in. Episode 2 topped the premiere’s chart peak and passed House of the Dragon on HBO Max. Chart points again, not viewers, with Nielsen due next month.
Update 8/23: The retention test starts with an Episode 2 that explains white men with money “play cowboy, build castles” and turns Hal Jordan into John Stewart’s “white man”, and goes full frontal with naked alien corpses to reveal the stadium’s alien detectors.
Update 8/21: One day later, HBO Max greenlit DC’s Jimmy Olsen mockumentary as The People v. Gorilla Grodd, and Gunn’s announcement tied it right back to this show. Why the timing is no coincidence.
Lanterns just delivered the biggest series premiere in DC Studios history on HBO Max.
Warner Bros. Discovery announced Thursday that the series pulled in 9.3 million global viewers across HBO and HBO Max in its first three days, with 6.6 million of those in the U.S. alone, per Variety.
That ranks among the top five series launches in the platform’s history. “The light shines bright,” WBD’s social team declared.
Cue the victory lap for James Gunn. Except the showrunner already told everyone Gunn had nothing to do with it.
A Big Number With The Right Context
9.3 million in three days is the biggest opening for any DC Studios series to date.
It also beats the pace of The Penguin, which isn’t even a DC Studios show and needed 11 days to reach 10.4 million across all platforms back in 2024. It: Welcome to Derry did 5.7 million in its first three days last year.
The announcement also ends the viral nonsense about Lanterns dethroning House of the Dragon. That claim was built on daily top 10 chart points, which measure rankings on the platform, not viewers.
The real data is now in.
House of the Dragon Season 3 opened to 21.5 million global viewers in its first three days in June and went on to average more than 33 million per episode, numbers WBD bragged about in its Q2 earnings.
Lanterns did less than half that in the same Sunday slot. It’s a genuine hit for DC. It is not the new king of HBO.
The Hit Gunn Didn’t Build
Here’s the part the celebration leaves out.
Showrunner Chris Mundy just told The Hollywood Reporter that Gunn was largely absent during development.
“At the very beginning, James was off doing Superman. He was in the trenches,” Mundy said, adding Gunn only came in for high-level notes and the writers “weren’t shoehorned into anything at all.”
The concept wasn’t Gunn’s either.
The grounded True Detective approach was an HBO Max network note that predates Gunn’s regime, the same note Greg Berlanti’s team refused to write, and per our insiders, the structure overlaps with the version HBO rejected.
Add in that HBO produces the series and Casey Bloys greenlights these shows script by script, and the picture is clear.
DC’s biggest series premiere on the platform belongs to HBO’s note and Mundy’s execution.
Meanwhile, the projects with Gunn’s fingerprints all over them keep flopping.
Supergirl just finished as the lowest-grossing DC movie ever. Peacemaker Season 2 bled nearly 40 percent of its audience and barely scraped onto Nielsen once all season, at No. 10 in finale week.
The one show Gunn kept his hands off is the one that worked, as he makes his farewell to DC.
Now Comes The Hard Part
As we reported Wednesday, Season 2 is not greenlit. Mundy is about six weeks into breaking a season on spec with Christopher Cantwell and says he’ll pitch it soon.
Thursday’s announcement arms that pitch. But premiere numbers are a starting gun, not a verdict.
Peacemaker Season 2 opened to its own touted debut before the audience walked out. How many of those fans are going to stick around? The same fans Lanterns targets. The test is whether 9.3 million holds through Sunday’s Episode 2 and shows up when Nielsen’s charts catch up next month.
How many of those viewers were actually looking for a new episode of House of the Dragon, which ended its third season the week prior?
And there’s still the question of who Mundy pitches to. The Paramount deal gives David Ellison veto power over major DC commitments, and per our insiders, Gunn is out once WBD is sold.
Mundy said you have to move forward with total confidence. As of Thursday, he has 9.3 million reasons.
