Green Lantern stories usually sprawl across galaxies, but Lanterns is starting with its boots planted firmly in dusty Nebraska. HBO’s upcoming DCU series plays less like a cape-and-ring spectacle and more like a slow-burn murder mystery, and according to showrunner Chris Mundy, that tonal choice was locked in from day one.
“We just committed pretty early,” Mundy told SFX. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, should we do it this way?’ [We said] ‘We’re going to do it this way.’ So we just started building it. In that way we were all in from the beginning.”
The pitch is closer to True Detective than Justice League. Lantern-in-training John Stewart, played by Aaron Pierre, is mentored by veteran Hal Jordan, played by Kyle Chandler, as the pair pick apart a string of killings. It’s a deliberately human framing for characters who can, in theory, bend reality with a piece of jewellery.
That restraint is a foundation, not a ceiling. Mundy makes it clear the show is designed to expand once it has earned the audience’s trust.
“We wanted to make sure that we were firmly walking the Earth first, and then hopefully you can build those relationships, and that trust inside the show, and you can keep doing more and more,” he explained.
The “more and more” is already peeking through. The second Lanterns trailer, released over SDCC weekend, leaned into imaginative uses of the Lantern ring, dropped a tease of the villain Sinestro, and slipped in what looked like interstellar-set scenes. For a show marketed as grounded, that’s a strong hint the cosmic gears are turning underneath.
Mundy, for his part, has no interest in leaving the toy box shut:
“We’d be stupid not to use everything that you can do inside the Green Lantern universe. They have these abilities. They have the ring. Their world is just bigger, and the way we use our storytelling can be bigger too. We sometimes had to remind ourselves that there’s as much or as little sci-fi in it as we want there to be.”
That last line is the tell. The creative team is treating the sci-fi dial as adjustable, starting low and turning it up as the story demands, rather than opening on a wall of green energy constructs. It’s a smart way to onboard viewers who might otherwise bounce off decades of dense Lantern lore.
The approach also positions Lanterns as a proving ground for how James Gunn’s DCU balances character-driven drama with the franchise’s more fantastical corners. If the murder mystery lands, the interstellar payoff has somewhere to grow.
Lanterns premieres on HBO on August 16.
