In brightest day, in blackest night... some exciting Lanterns news has found its way to the Empire site! Having been picked up for eight episodes at HBO and nabbed itself Kyle Chandler as co-lead already, DC's hotly anticipated — and long, long awaited — Green Lantern TV show has now found a director for its first block of episodes. According to THR, British director James Hawes — whose body of work includes the entire first series of Apple TV+ spy series Slow Horses and Anthony Hopkins led WWII drama One Life — has signed on to helm Lanterns' first two instalments.
The brainchild of showrunner Chris Mundy (True Detective: Night Country) and co-writers Damon Lindelof (Watchmen) and DC Comics legend Tom King, Lanterns is set to take the comics' ring-bearing space police force and make of it a gritty, True Detective style crime drama. Chandler will appear in the show as classic Lantern Hal Jordan (formerly played by Ryan Reynolds in the film that must not be named), who's tasked with reluctantly training up young gun John Stewart as the duo become embroiled in a murder-mystery down on Earth. Whilst the Stewart role has yet to confirm an actor, we do know that Rebel Ridge's Aaron Pierre and The Piano Lesson's Stephan James are down to the final two to play the new Lantern on the block.
It's been a long and winding road that's taken us to Lanterns, from Seth Grahame-Smith and Greg Berlanti's first stab at getting the show going way back in 2020 to Finn Wittrock and Jeremy Irvine's short-lived casting as Lanterns Guy Gardner and Alan Scott the year after, and then a couple years of radio silence thereafter. But now, with an impressive team being assembled both in front of and behind the camera, it looks like Lanterns — the first live-action show in James Gunn's new-look DC Universe — is finally ready to shine. Rings at the ready!