Copyright Inverse
DC Studios has a lot of irons in the fire, but the most intriguing might be Lanterns. The first live-action exploration of the Green Lantern Corps since the 2011 film that won’t be named, Lanterns is set to deliver a faithful look at fan favorites like Hal Jordan and John Stewart. The duo will team up as reluctant partners in the upcoming series; according to creator and showrunner Chris Mundy, Lanterns is “as much of a buddy cop show as a superhero show.” In a recent interview with Men’s Health, Mundy gave fans the best tease of Lanterns’ plot yet. Story details were scarce until recently, but fans assumed (or, rather, hoped) that Lanterns would hew close to Hal and John’s comic book dynamic. Mundy seems to confirm as much, teasing a push-and-pull between disparate generations. “Our show is in a lot of ways about replacement,” Mundy explained. “When should someone step aside and when is it time for the next person to take the reins?” Lanterns will pit Hal, an “old-school” Air Force man, with the quietly assured John, while also straddling multiple time periods to offer different dimensions to its characters. “John’s sort of a different person in one [time period] than he is in another,” Mundy said. That may be because Lanterns is remixing John’s origins, reconciling the military man he’s known as today with his original comic book occupation. The role of John Stewart was reportedly a tough one to fill. Mundy and his co-creators, Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof and comic writer Tom King, were looking for an actor who could embody “a real balance of the physical and the artistic” within John. “He was a Marine sniper, which requires a certain kind of focus and diligence,” Mundy said. “After the Marines, he becomes an architect, so there’s an artistic side to him. Those are a lot of elements that an actor has got to be able to project... The audience has to believe that he could take a guy down with one punch, and also believe that he could sketch intricate portraits of his family and birds and all these beautiful things.” Making John a former Marine is a pivot from the version of the character most know. John originally had no military experience: though he could hold his own in a fight, he was introduced as an architect and civil rights activist who distrusted authority. It wasn’t until Bruce Timm brought John Stewart into his Justice League series that his military background became an inextricable part of his character. As Timm explained in 2010, he felt the series “needed not only a diversity in ethnicity but also in personality,” so he tweaked John’s origins to make him stand out amid a group of less-disciplined heroes. DC eventually adopted Timm’s retcon. Shortly after Timm’s Justice League Unlimited came to an end, John Stewart was reintroduced as a Marine sniper. That change was explored fully in Green Lantern Vol. 4 #49, which established the character’s new history with the Marines. His career as an architect moved into the background, and it’s a change that most fans seemed to accept, even if the “old” version of John proved more dynamic than the modern, buttoned-up Jarhead. Now, Lanterns is trying to split the difference. “Being a Marine is John’s job, but it’s not his entire personality,” Mundy told Men’s Health. “He’s as much an artist as he is a Marine. There’s a real balance of the physical and the artistic that’s just innately inside of Aaron, and I think it’s essential.” So essential, in fact, that the comics have already retconned John’s origins to align with his upcoming portrayal in Lanterns. “That’s the Way of the World,” penned by Morgan Hampton and Clayton Henry and published in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest 2025 Annual, establishes John as a Marine who leaves military service to pursue his childhood dreams of becoming an architect. In every corner of the DC Universe, John Stewart is becoming a new man — and Lanterns is poised to give fans a new version of the character. Lanterns is scheduled to premiere in 2026.
