HBO’s Lanterns premieres August 16, and the controversy surrounding it has been building since the first trailer dropped. Now, with showrunner Chris Mundy’s own words on the record, fans have more reason than ever to question what James Gunn’s DC Universe has done with one of comics’ most iconic properties.
Mundy sat down with Men’s Health to talk about the show’s creative direction. His description of the central theme should concern anyone who has watched Hollywood handle legacy characters over the last decade.
“Our show is in a lot of ways about replacement,” Mundy said. “When should someone step aside and when is it time for the next person to take the reins? That push and pull between those two characters is really important. So much of the power that John has is by not taking the bait, understanding that you lose your power if you’re yelling and screaming. That’s what we’re trying to convey: He knows he belongs, so he doesn’t have to overcompensate.”
Read that again. The showrunner’s own description of the show’s central theme is replacement. Hal Jordan, one of the most beloved characters in DC history, is positioned as the one who needs to step aside. John Stewart, played by Aaron Pierre, is the next man who “knows he belongs.” The messaging is not subtle.
In the comics, Hal Jordan retired and John Stewart eventually replaced him as Earth’s primary Green Lantern, before Hal un-retired and the two worked as partners. But the language Mundy uses goes further, with industry observers noting the word “replacement” opens the door to Hal being retired, killed, or even turned villain, as happened in the famous Parallax storyline. Cosmic Book News reported that fans have been speculating Hal Jordan could be killed off specifically to make way for Stewart as the DCU’s permanent Green Lantern, a race-swap through narrative removal rather than organic storytelling.
Mundy also went to ComicBook this week to address mounting fan anger over the trailer itself. His response to the backlash did not exactly project confidence.
“It was less challenging than it was just exciting,” Mundy said. “Our take was that we have this incredibly rich mythology within the Green Lantern canon, and we have this incredibly rich history of Sunday night HBO shows, everything from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones and in between. The fun of it was to try to create a real, layered drama that dealt with who these characters are as human beings while still staying true to the spirit of what makes the comics so special. We wanted it to be accessible for anyone who doesn’t know the canon but, at the same time, satisfying for people who know the lore in minute detail. So, yes, it was challenging, but only in the way that the most fun things are.”
The comparison to The Sopranos and Game of Thrones tells you everything about where this creative team’s priorities lie. Green Lantern is a cosmic property about an intergalactic police force, willpower constructs, alien worlds, and one of the most visually inventive mythologies in superhero comics. The showrunner’s reference frame is prestige crime drama and medieval fantasy. These are not the same thing, and the trailer proved it.
The show’s first trailer drew criticism for how drab and desaturated it was, bearing more in common with Yellowstone or True Detective than a cosmic, intergalactic sci-fi epic. The only glimpse of a Green Lantern costume in the trailer was a largely brown and black jacket hanging in Hal Jordan’s closet. Reddit threads across multiple DC communities filled with fans pointing out the absence of any visual identity connected to the source material. GaminglayoffsWikipedia
Co-creator Damon Lindelof made things worse. When the trailer drew criticism for its lack of green, Lindelof joked on the Lovett or Leave It podcast: “It’s called Lanterns, because we all agreed that the ‘Green’ was stupid, so now it’s just Lanterns.” The remark prompted Grant Morrison, who wrote The Green Lantern comic from 2018 to 2021, to blast Lindelof on Substack for being “ashamed and in denial” about the source material. The trailer was subsequently pulled from YouTube entirely, with the studio citing a music licensing issue, though the removal came directly after a wave of online criticism over the show’s tone and visual direction.
The trailer has since reappeared. The creative direction has not changed.
Viewers pointed out a washed-out color palette that stripped away the vibrant identity you expect from a Green Lantern project. Instead of anything cosmic or visually striking, it looked grounded to a fault, more like a generic crime drama than a story about an intergalactic police force. The heavy emphasis on an earthbound murder investigation in rural America, with little visible scale and no cosmic elements in the marketing, has fans questioning whether the show understands what made Green Lantern worth adapting.
Green Lantern’s core appeal has always been the intersection of willpower, imagination, and the infinite scale of the universe. Hal Jordan is one of comics’ great test-pilot archetypes: fearless, irreverent, driven by pure will. John Stewart is a disciplined military veteran whose constructs reflect a trained architect’s precision. Both characters are rich. Both have decades of stories worth telling. A show that called itself Green Lantern and went to space with those two characters would have had enormous potential.
Instead, Lanterns is a murder mystery in Nebraska with a showrunner who jokes that “the green was stupid,” a co-creator who compares it to The Sopranos, and a central theme the showrunner himself describes as replacement.
The show premieres August 16 on HBO. Whether it finds an audience beyond the True Detective crowd remains to be seen, but the fanbase that knows and loves this mythology has already delivered its verdict on the trailers. Mundy’s interview responses have done nothing to change that verdict.
What do you think of the direction Gunn and Mundy have taken Lanterns? Let us know in the comments.
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This show is dead on arrival.