UPDATE 9/1: Fans think Damon Lindelof just confirmed Season 2. He didn’t â his answer leads with “if,” and neither he nor Tom King returns if it happens.
UPDATE 8/27: The retention test has its first result. Episode 2 beat the premiere’s chart peak and passed House of the Dragon on HBO Max.
UPDATE: Chandler’s block-shooting reveal matters more than it sounds: it breaks the script-first rule James Gunn built his DC regime on.
The Lanterns cast isn’t assuming a Season 2 is coming.
Stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre tell THR that while a second season is being written on spec, neither actor is getting ahead of himself until HBO officially orders one.
“Whatever happens will happen. Whatever is meant to be will be,” Pierre says. “Of course, we would love to go again and again.”
He adds the cast poured so much into the show that “we are at peace with it” no matter what HBO decides.
‘Whatever Is Meant To Be Will Be’
As we covered, Season 2 is not greenlit. Showrunner Chris Mundy and Christopher Cantwell are provisionally breaking story in a writers room without a pickup.
THR notes the actors are staying out of it until the studio and network make it official, in an industry where an acclaimed series can be renewed one day and un-renewed the next.
Chandler keeps it lighter. “I am very optimistic,” he jokes, claiming he handed the writers his own versions of the first two scripts “along with a packet of cash.”
The renewal math got its first real data point Thursday, when the premiere pulled 9.3 million viewers in three days, DC Studios’ biggest series debut on HBO Max. Now comes the retention test.
They Shot The Season Without All The Scripts
Chandler also reveals the season was block-shot before all eight scripts existed.
“The full storyline wasn’t in front of us; it was described to us,” he says, admitting the approach “required a lot of faith and trust in the storyline.”
Chandler says the nonlinear structure let the actors set up their own traps and play against material that would only pay off later, calling it “3D chess.”
Pierre adds that only around 15 percent of the season shot on the WB lot, with the rest on location, turning the production into what he calls a real traveling company.
Chandler Isn’t Reading The Fan Debate
The premiere set off a loud reaction from Green Lantern fans, and Chandler says he won’t see any of it.
The 60-year-old says people warned him before San Diego Comic-Con about what the “true aficionados” would think of his Hal Jordan.
His answer: no social media, no websites, “so they can call me what they want and I won’t know.”
“I can’t please anyone, so I have to do it myself,” Chandler says, adding that realization freed him to make the performance as raw as he wanted. “Damn the torpedoes, let’s see what happens.”
As for the pilot’s ending, Chandler confirms he asked about the twist when he first read the script, with Mundy reiterating that Hal’s death was baked in from the beginning and Chandler knew going in.
John Stewart Continues Either Way
One detail worth pulling out: Pierre has already reprised John Stewart in Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow, so his Green Lantern shows up on the big screen regardless of what happens with Lanterns.
Hal Jordan’s future is another story, and so is the show’s.
The renewal decision runs through an HBO where Casey Bloys greenlights script by script, a merger that gives David Ellison sign-off on major DC commitments, and, per our insiders, a DC Studios boss on his way out once WBD is sold.
Pierre says there’s a whole town of crew behind the show that made it possible. Whether that town gets a second season is now up to the people fighting over who owns Warner Bros.
And the Lanterns actor who survives heads to a galaxy far, far away.
