UPDATE 9/1: Damon Lindelof’s Season 2 comments have fans calling it confirmed. It isn’t â his quote leads with “if,” and the writers room is still the same spec room described below.
UPDATE 8/27: Mundy’s spec pitch just picked up a data point. Episode 2 beat the premiere’s chart peak and passed House of the Dragon on HBO Max, so the audience question he raised is trending his way.
UPDATE: With Season 2 still unordered and being written on spec, stars Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre say they’re “at peace” if a second season never comes. WBD has also released the numbers: Lanterns premiered to 9.3 million global viewers in its first three days, DC Studios’ biggest series debut on HBO Max. We break down the numbers, and why Gunn can’t take the credit, here. Chandler also now reveals the season shot without finished scripts, breaking Gunn’s own script-first rule.
Lanterns Season 2 is not greenlit.
Showrunner Chris Mundy confirms to The Hollywood Reporter that he is about six weeks into laying out a potential second season with Halt and Catch Fire co-creator Christopher Cantwell, and that “we’ll talk to folks about it really soon.”
No scripts exist yet. Mundy says they are still in the breaking-story stage, building out a season on spec in the hope HBO orders one.
Whether that pitch goes anywhere comes down to the audience. “The question is whether [season two] is a story people are interested in,” Mundy says.
HBO had not released viewership numbers for the series at the time of publishing (see the update above).
Mundy Is Pitching Season 2 Without A Greenlight
Co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom King won’t be part of a second season. Both are off running their own new series, The Chain and Mister Miracle, which is why Cantwell is in the room instead.
Mundy says a second season would be told in a slightly different way so it feels fresh, built around characters viewers already know and care about.
He’s also candid about the limbo. “You have to go forward with total confidence,” he says, while admitting you also can’t be crushed if HBO passes. He calls it a bizarre dance every showrunner without a pickup has to do.
Gunn Was ‘Off Doing Superman’ During Development
Mundy also confirms James Gunn largely left the creative team alone.
“At the very beginning, James was off doing Superman. He was in the trenches,” Mundy says, adding Gunn only came in for high-level notes and gave the writers “a fair amount of trust.”
Gunn never even required a Man of Tomorrow setup point for John Stewart. Mundy jokes there was no mandate to leave him “at a bus stop in Omaha,” and that while the show puts John on his feet, the writers “weren’t shoehorned into anything at all.”
That account lines up with our previous reporting.
The grounded True Detective concept was an HBO network note that predates Gunn’s regime, and per our insiders, the structure overlaps with the Green Lantern series HBO rejected from Greg Berlanti’s team.
Now the showrunner’s own telling has Gunn at a distance while the show he and Peter Safran called a foundational part of the DCU got built.
Hal Jordan’s Death Was The Plan From Day One
Mundy confirms Hal Jordan’s death was baked in from the very beginning, and Kyle Chandler knew before ever stepping on set. This also mirrors Berlanti’s and Guggenheim’s original plans to kill off Green Lantern Alan Scott.
Chandler never raised a concern, Mundy says, despite having just been killed off in the Mayor of Kingstown pilot a few years back. Mundy compares the structure to Bloodline, which he wrote on: establish the death up front, then let the season catch the audience up to it.
Hal’s on-screen death arrived exactly as our insiders said it would, and the fan backlash has been loud. Mundy says he understands where it comes from: “I really care about this thing. Don’t mess it up.”
His answer is that the current team are only temporary custodians. “This is just our story for a minute,” Mundy says, noting someone else will be the steward of Green Lantern five or ten years from now.
Given everything swirling around DC’s ownership, that handoff may come sooner than he thinks.
