Despite being busy shooting Man of Tomorrow, DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn has just shared a new motion poster for Lanterns. The series arrives on HBO later this summer and has generated far more positive buzz thanks to a much-improved second trailer.
Focusing on a Green Lantern Corps ring and the shadows cast by Hal Jordan and John Stewart, this poster features a tagline that will be instantly familiar to comic book fans: "In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night..."
That's the first part of the Green Lantern Oath. "In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight," it typically goes. "Let those who worship evil's might, beware my power... Green Lantern's light!" Will we get to hear it spoken out loud in Lanterns? The show is very grounded, but it would be a real shame not to include that somehow.
It's the grounded take on these characters that has proven a real sticking point for many fans thus far. The cheesiness of the 2011 movie not factoring into this HBO drama isn't a surprise, but a lot of what fans love about Green Lantern may be sacrificed as a result.
Lanterns showrunner Chris Mundy previously said that the series revolves around "the old guard and the heir apparent. We lean into that tension quite a bit in that early time period." Teasing "something else" for the present-day timeline, he added, "That becomes a second mystery that we know is down the road for us. So eventually two different mysteries get worked out over the course of the show."
That "[creates] emotional mysteries," and like True Detective, "It was less of a whodunnit as much as like, what happened and why? We think of this as a relationship show between John and Hal, and there's a lot to unpack over the course of the eight episodes."
However, while the "fabulously obnoxious" Guy Gardner, played by Nathan Fillion, appears "a few different times," Mundy has confirmed that we won't see any alien members of the Green Lantern Corps.
"There are a bunch of other people from the mythology, from the canon, but not the other Lanterns," he explained. "We talk about them at different times, but they're not gonna interact with them in the course of this season."
Lanterns follows new recruit John Stewart and Lantern legend Hal Jordan, two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.
Alongside Kyle Chander and Aaron Pierre, Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Nicole Ari Parker, Jason Ritter, J. Alphonse Nicholson, and Jasmine Cephas Jones round out the cast.
The pilot is co-written by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, who are co-creators for the series. Mundy serves as showrunner. The first two episodes are directed by James Hawes, with Stephen Williams, Geeta Vasant Patel and Alik Sakharov also tapped to direct.
Lanterns is executive produced by Mundy, Lindelof, James Gunn, Peter Safran, King, Ron Schmidt, and Hawes, and is based on the DC comic characters from Green Lantern.
Lanterns is set to premiere on HBO on August 16.