UPDATE, August 20: The note delivered: Lanterns premiered to 9.3 million global viewers, the biggest series debut in DC Studios history on HBO Max. Here’s the full ratings breakdown and who actually deserves the credit.
UPDATE: Lanterns Episode 1 has now aired, with Hal Jordan’s on-screen death confirmed by last night’s premiere, and the same insiders who called it say a SnyderVerse return is coming with Gunn out.
Update, August 13: Speaking of Gunn’s vision: the Supergirl AI reveal, and word from our insiders that Gunn’s writers room uses AI on Man of Tomorrow.
When Lanterns premieres Sunday on HBO, it arrives as what Gunn and Peter Safran called “a foundational part of the unified DCU,” or what’s left of it.
But buried in The Ankler’s report, the same one that revealed Waller and Paradise Lost are dead, is a detail that changes the authorship story entirely.
The grounded, True Detective-style concept wasn’t Gunn’s idea. It wasn’t Chris Mundy’s, or Damon Lindelof’s, or Tom King’s, either.
It was an HBO Max network note to make things cheaper. One the previous creative team refused to write.
‘True Detective With Power Rings’ was from a previous version
Greg Berlanti had been developing Green Lantern for HBO Max since 2019, back when the Arrowverse made him the king of DC television.
Alongside Marc Guggenheim, his co-writer on the 2011 Green Lantern movie, and Seth Grahame-Smith, Berlanti’s team completed eight scripts. That’s an entire first season of a space-set epic.
Per the report, HBO Max executives balked at the price tag and kept pushing one direction instead.
“We kept getting these notes saying they want True Detective with power rings,” Guggenheim tells the outlet, adding that ultimately wasn’t the show his team was interested in giving them.
Berlanti and Guggenheim reportedly hoped the series would be a redemption story after their Ryan Reynolds movie flopped. Instead, Berlanti’s DC exit got signed off at the very top of WBD, per The Ankler.
Gunn Announced The Network’s Note As His Vision
Now rewind to January 2023, when Gunn and Safran unveiled the Gods and Monsters slate.
Gunn pitched Lanterns to the world as a True Detective-style mystery, with Hal Jordan and John Stewart investigating a dark mystery in the American heartland.
Sound familiar? That’s the note, practically word for word.
In May 2024, Mundy, Lindelof, and King were brought in specifically to develop the more grounded, True Detective-style version of the Green Lantern story, per the report.
So the first live-action series developed start to finish under Gunn and Safran, the one premiering Sunday with Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre, is the show HBO Max executives asked for years before Gunn even had the job.
HBO makes the DC decisions not Gunn
None of this should surprise anyone who has followed how DC television actually operates.
HBO boss Casey Bloys greenlights these shows script by script, on his read of the page, not off any Gunn master plan.
And per my sources, filmmakers keep clashing with Gunn because everything has to match his vision.
The punchline is that his flagship TV series is a network note with his name on top.
It’s also the last thing standing. Waller and Paradise Lost are dead, Booster Gold is hunting for a new writer (if it happens), and Lanterns itself hasn’t even been renewed yet.
Berlanti and Guggenheim got the note, wrote a whole season their own way, and walked.
Gunn got the same note and called it his vision. On Sunday, everyone finally gets to grade the note.
