James Gunn Reveals The Writing Team Behind DC's Green Lanterns TV Show (Updated)

Update 6/25/24: HBO has confirmed that "Lanterns" has received a greenlight with the folks below still on board. Not only that, but this series, along with the "Harry Potter" show, the "IT" prequel show "Welcome to Derry," and other big-budget WB shows, will no longer be branded as Max exclusives. Instead, they'll be HBO originals, and will air on HBO and be available to stream on the Max streaming platform. Our original article from May 25, 2024 continues below.

DC Studios' upcoming Green Lantern TV show, "Lanterns," has assembled its writer corps. Co-CEO James Gunn confirmed on Instagram today that the series' pilot script and show bible was written by Chris Mundy ("Ozark," "Criminal Minds"), Damon Lindelof ("Watchmen," "Lost"), and DC Comics writer Tom King, who has been part of the DC Universe's creative team since the start. 

"Lanterns" was first announced in January 2023, along with the rest of the "Gods and Monsters" slate, as it's been dubbed by Gunn and his fellow co-CEO, Peter Safran. It's a soft reboot for the DC Extended Universe, which fizzled out into a succession of box office bombs (including "Shazam! Fury of the Gods," "Black Adam," and "The Flash"), and is currently taking a bit of a breather while Gunn and Safran assemble this massive new slate of films and TV shows. Gunn is also getting personally stuck in, writing and directing the upcoming "Superman" movie reboot and continuing his creative duties on "Peacemaker" for season 2.

Tom King's work on the comics side has divided DC fans, but Gunn seems to believe strongly in his vision. The next movie on the slate after "Superman" is "Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow," based on a comic series of the same name by King. Lindelof has experience with bringing the world of comics to the small screen with HBO's acclaimed sequel series "Watchmen." Meanwhile, Mundy was an executive producer and writer on the most recent season of "True Detective," a show that was name-dropped when Gunn first announced "Lanterns":

"This is a story of a couple of Green Lanterns: John Stewart and Hal Jordan, and we have a few other Lanterns peppered in there, but this is really a terrestrial-based TV show, which is almost like 'True Detective' with a couple of Green Lanterns who are space cops watching over precinct Earth. In it, they discover a terrifying mystery that ties into our larger story of the DCU."

This announcement came in response to Mundy and other "Lanterns" writers being revealed via the show's listing on their official Writers Guild of America pages. Referred to by Gunn as "a crack team of writers," they include Justin H. Britt-Gibson ("The Strain"), Breannah Gibson (an executive story editor on "The Penguin," another upcoming DC series), and Vanessa Baden Kelly ("Animal Kingdom"). While this might sound like a lot of cooks in the kitchen, it's pretty standard for TV shows to have a writers' room made up of around 7-10 people. It's an essential part of the TV ecosystem, allowing new writers to gain experience as story editors and staff writers before taking on bigger roles as showrunners or lead writers. One of the key issues of last year's WGA strike was maintaining healthy writers' rooms, and preventing them from dwindling into exploitative mini rooms.

It's especially fitting for "Lanterns" to have a "crack team" of writers, since this corner of the DC Universe is all about teamwork. Though Green Lantern originally started out in the comics as a single superhero, like Batman or Superman, he was later rebooted as a Green Lantern — merely one of a vast interstellar team of space cops. The Green Lanterns wield power rings, which allow them to create temporary light-based constructs of any object they can imagine, and to fly through space without any need for a spaceship.

The Green Lanterns made a couple of brief appearances in the DCEU, but otherwise have been mostly left untouched since the box office disaster of 2011's "Green Lantern" movie. The concept isn't an easy one to translate to the screen, but hopefully this team will have what it takes.