When James Gunn and Peter Safran took the reins of the DC franchise four years ago, they came in with ambitious creative and logistical plans. After years of back-and-forth prior in which the franchise seemingly couldn’t quite decide what to do in the aftermath of the commercial and critical disaster that was 2017’s attempt at a Justice League film, Gunn and Safran made the call to (mostly) wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. This resulted in a whole interweaving slate of projects across TV and film, including Creature Commandos, Superman, Peacemaker, Supergirl, Clayface, and the HBO series Lanterns.
In addition to those already released projects, DC Studios also currently has multiple plans in place for further works, but all of those plans were just thrown into varying degrees of uncertainty due to the announcement that Gunn and Safran are “stepping down” from their leadership positions. In the wake of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, the now-unanimously called Skydance company has elected to appoint a new leader to DC Studios. So what exactly does that mean for future DC Studios plans, such as the potential second season of Lanterns? One of the showrunners has commented, and it doesn’t look great.
Starring Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler, Lanterns was a massive critical and commercial success for both HBO and DC Studios. After years of Green Lantern being the butt-of-the-joke thanks to the 2010 film and Ryan Reynolds’ continued insistence on lampooning his own performance in that film in more popular works like Deadpool, Lanterns effectively reintroduced the character to general audiences in a subversive and altogether compelling way. Notably, the series is set to tie directly into James Gunn’s own Man of Tomorrow film, his Superman sequel, which will see Aaron Pierre joining the fray as Green Lantern proper.
Given the success of the series and the fact that, at the very least, Pierre was set to become a face of the larger DC franchise moving forward, there had already been substantial talks about a second season, with a writer’s room having been assembled and with reports indicating it was only a matter of time before it was greenlit in earnest. However, the news of Gunn and Safran’s stepping down has completely changed the dynamic now, and for his part, co-showrunner Chris Mundy isn’t certain about anything moving forward now.
Mundy created Lanterns alongside Tom King and Damon Lindelof. In an interview mere hours after the news of DC Studios’ leadership change broke, Mundy told The Playlis, "We thought everything had settled [after the merger]… I can imagine a world where everyone retreats to their corners, but then, you know, it's a coin flip, 50/50."
Basically, Mundy seems just as unsure about things as everyone else does. The fact that a week ago Lanterns season two seemed all-but-guaranteed makes this that much more painful, as its fate now seems entirely up in the air. We’ll all just have to wait and see what happens moving forward, but for DC fans, this is an undoubtedly familiar position, one in which new management has come in and is reticent to outright say they’re scrapping previous plans but begin killing off projects one by one.
We imagine that the success of Lanterns will help the show's odds of renewal, but it appears that nothing is certain at the moment and there is no telling a second season will happen now that Gunn and Safran have been pushed out.
Add us as a preferred source on Google