Advertisement

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

The new DCU drama is almost here

Phil Owen
Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler, Lanterns

Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler, Lanterns

John Johnson/HBO Max

Thanks to Paramount Skydance's proposed mega-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 continues to wait for that situation to sort itself out, DC Studios has the new HBO Max series Lanterns, a thriller in which the two most well-known Green Lanterns from the comics, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), try to solve a heinous crime in flyover country. 

Now, with Supergirl bombing at movie theater box offices this summer, the pressure is on HBO and Lanterns to deliver a hit for James Gunn's burgeoning cinematic universe. Here's what we know about Lanterns so far.

More on HBO and HBO Max:

Lanterns premiere date

Lanterns will premiere on Aug. 16 at 9/8c on HBO and HBO Max.

Lanterns trailers

While all the previous trailers were light on the details, this final trailer, which HBO revealed at San Diego Comic-Con in late July, gets all up in the gritty details of this series. I guess they didn't want to get into the nerdy stuff too far in advance.

We'll talk more about what this trailer is showing us down in the story section of this article a little further down. For those of you who'd prefer a trailer that sets the stage without getting into the weeds, we've got the previous teaser for you here.

What will Lanterns be about, and is it connected to Supergirl?

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 Nebraska. According to the final trailer, the victims are aliens from another planet, and the killers are the vicious shapeshifting androids known as Manhunters. 

The Manhunters, created by Jack Kirby in the 1970s, served as the galactic peacekeeping force back in the day, but they went bad and murdered nearly the entire population of a galactic sector. The powers-that-be — the Guardians of the Universe, which had commissioned the Manhunters — then replaced the Manhunters as galactic police with the Green Lantern Corps. But the Manhunters were never defeated, and the Green Lantern Corps. has had to battle them many times. And it looks like we'll be seeing another one of those times when Hal Jordan and John Stewart face off with them on this series.

While the scope of that context is pretty big, the story itself will supposedly stay pretty contained. 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 new take on 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 told 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 or Supergirl, 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." 

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

Lanterns cast and crew

Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre

Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre

Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

We now know who will be wearing the Lantern rings on this series — Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights' Coach Taylor) will play Hal Jordan, 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 last 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."

Meanwhile, 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:

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. 

Advertisement