Everything to Know About Lanterns, HBO's Green Lantern TV Series

Thanks to Paramount Skydance's proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros., there are all sorts of questions about the long-term future of James Gunn's newly rebooted cinematic universe based on DC Comics. But in the meantime, while everybody waits for that situation to sort itself out — which could take a while — DC Studios has a big summer planned with the Supergirl film in May and the new HBO Max series Lanterns, a thriller in which the two most well-known Green Lanterns from the comics, Hal Jordan and John Stewart, try to solve a heinous crime in flyover country.

Since TV and streaming is a huge part of DC's strategy during this attempt to replicate the success of the MCU, Lanterns is certainly one to pay attention to. Here's what we know about Lanterns so far.

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Lanterns latest news

It's teaser time! After the trailer leaked online, DC Studios went ahead and posted it on their own socials earlier than they'd planned. Check it out below.

Lanterns first teaser trailer

This teaser, amusingly, offers absolutely no story details beyond noting that John Stewart is new to being a Lantern and will be using his ring for the first time during the events of the series. Other than that, it's a context-free montage of stuff — this trailer is all about setting the tone, I guess. 

Lanterns premiere date

According to this first teaser, Lanterns will premiere in Aug. 2026.

Lanterns cast and crew

We now know who will be wearing the Lantern rings on this series — Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights' Coach Taylor) will play Hal Jordan, the old hat, and Aaron Pierre, who had a breakout moment in 2024 thanks to his star turn in Netflix's Rebel Ridge, will play Stewart. These castings aren't just for this series — Chandler and Pierre will reprise these roles in other Green Lantern-related DC shows or movies if they aren't killed off, and they probably won't be because these are the two main Green Lanterns that people know from the comics.

A third Lantern will also make an appearance in some capacity — Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner, who played a key role in this summer's Superman film, is also going to show up. 

"He's a jerk!" Fillion previously told TV Guide about the character. "What's important to know is, you don't have to be good to be a Green Lantern; you just have to be fearless. So Guy Gardner is fearless, and he is not very good. He's not nice, which is very freeing as an actor because you just think to yourself, what is the most selfish, self-serving thing I can do in this moment? And that's the answer."

For now, it seems as though Garrett Dillahunt's William Macon is positioned to be one of the bad guys, with his son Billy (Jason Ritter) being a possible wild card. Though with this series being a mystery, it probably won't be as simple as that — this is the sort of thing that usually includes lots of twists and a big reveal at the end that upends everything we thought we knew about what was going on.

Lanterns will be run by Ozark showrunner Chris Mundy, with Lost's Damon Lindelof producing and co-writing.

Lanterns cast:

• Kyle Chandler as Green Lantern Hal Jordan
• Aaron Pierre as Green Lantern John Stewart
• Kelly Macdonald as Kerry, a sheriff who is also Hal's love interest
• Garrett Dillahunt as William Macon, "a self-righteous, conspiracy-minded man who masks his ruthless ambition behind a charming and calculated facade"
• Jason Ritter as Billy Macon
• Poorna Jagannathan as Zoe, a rumored love interest for John
• Nicole Ari Parker as John's mother, Bernadette
• Jasmine Cephas Jones as the younger Bernadette
• Sherman Augustus as John Stewart Sr.
• J. Alphonse Nicholson as the younger John Sr.
• Ulrich Thomsen as Sinestro, a rogue former member of the Green Lantern Corps
• Paul Ben-Victor as the alien investigator Antaan. 
• Chris Coy as Waylon Sanders

What will Lanterns be about, and will it be connected to Superman?

The Green Lantern Corps is basically a cosmic police organization, and Lanterns will be a True Detective-esque noir thriller story in which Jordan and Stewart, who is new on the job, investigate a murder in American flyover country, specifically Nebraska. That's all the info we have about the story, even with the grim and gritty two-minute teaser trailer up above. But we know much more about the vibe the series will have.

In an October 2025 interview in Men's Health, showrunner Chris Mundy described the series as being "as much of a buddy cop show as a superhero show," which also fits with the True Detective comparison since the first season of that series was more or less a straight faced parody of the buddy cop subgenre. Mundy went into more detail about the dynamic Aaron Pierre's up-and-comer John Stewart will have with Kyle Chandler's Hal Jordan, the old hat of the pair.

"Our show is in a lot of ways about replacement—when should someone step aside and when is it time for the next person to take the reins?" Mundy said in an interview with Men's Health. "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. There's a real balance there that's just innately inside of Aaron. He's big. He's an intimidating presence just physically. But there's a softness to him too. There's a thoughtfulness. You can't teach that."

As for potential story connections to Superman, Mundy told Vanity Fair in February 2025 that "[Lanterns is] not part of a larger storytelling plan right now," referencing Gunn's new DC universe. He continued, "Season 1 is designed to be its own, complete season of television that, hopefully, will become many seasons of television." 

However, Gunn said there is a connection to Superman, in the form of another Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, who will be played by Nathan Fillion in the film. "It's really so cool because it is connected to Superman because we've got Guy Gardner in that, and then we've got these green lanterns over here," Gunn said, according to Screenrant. "It's just such a different tone from what Superman is. And it's exactly what I want to bring to the DCU [which] is being able to have these very different films and television series that are still part of an overall connected world, but have completely different feels to 'em."

So it seems as though Lanterns will exist in the same universe as Superman, but it'll be a side story set after those events rather than any kind of direct continuation of its story. Which isn't particularly surprising, since the film didn't end up including any references to any other specific Lanterns. 

Where to watch Green Lantern

While it's not a good movie in any normal sense and has no connections to other films, the 2011 Green Lantern movie, which starred Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, does still serve as a decent introduction to the Green Lantern Corps, which have not appeared elsewhere in live-action.