Superhero fans, there’s an exciting series on the 2026 TV schedule called Lanterns. In a landscape where comic book movies and TV shows have crowded the market in recent years, it makes sense that HBO would go an unexpected route with its Green Lanterns series and frame it as a cop show. However, fans have been showing early disappointment over the route it's going, and specifically the lack of green.
A couple of months ago, the first look at Lanterns dropped, and there’s something fans noticed right away. There’s a startling lack of green. Now Lanterns’ showrunner Chris Mundy has commented on the popular gripe, saying this:
The aesthetic of the show — it's supposed to be very grounded and real, so we're shooting practically in places. We're not heavily green-screened. It's not like day glow in its presentation of anything. I think Green Lantern fans will not feel like we've somehow made a brown show of their green comic at all. It's very much 'we're in the world,' and then when we use the constructs, they're what people would expect them to be.
Lanterns stars Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan, a legendary Green Lantern who is approaching retirement, and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, the Corps’ newest recruit. You can check out the first trailer below:
Previously, Chris Mundy has said that they wanted to lean into HBO’s “incredibly rich history of Sunday night shows” by giving fans a “real, layered drama” on top of very much incorporating the rich mythology that comes with the Green Lantern comics. In his latest comments with Entertainment Weekly, the showrunner also said this about the trailer backlash:
We could have put out a trailer that was tremendously green. So the fact that people are talking about it just means, to me, that they're excited about the show. We have a lot of respect for the source material, otherwise we wouldn't be doing this show. I think when people see it, it won't be a controversy.
Another aspect of the controversy around Lanterns came when executive producer Damon Lindelof said the show was called Lanterns because they “all agreed that the ‘Green’ was stupid.” This led comic book writer Grant Morrison to comment, asking, “Why does a writer attach himself to this kind of narrative if he thinks it’s fundamentally ‘stupid’?”
When it comes to Lanterns not having enough green, there’s an element of trailers where they don’t want to give it all away in the marketing. Per Mundy, the visual effects in Lanterns are on the “medium-to-low side” of things, but there’s “plenty in it” to look forward to, including instances of the characters going off planet and getting to “conjure anything from the ring.”
Lanterns may not give audiences what you’d entirely expect from a superhero series, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see how it balances a more grounded murder investigation with the more sci-fi elements of what makes Green Lantern, Green Lantern. Anyway, Lanterns is set to premiere on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, August 16.
