The huge changes within Warner Bros. and HBO Max are continuing to have repercussions on the DC movie and TV universe. The latest casualty is Seth Grahame-Smith (of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies fame), who has departed the long-developing Green Lantern HBO Max series as the writer and showrunner.
As reported on THR, Grahame-Smith completed full scripts for all eight planned episodes, but his approach favouring the Alan Scott and Guy Gardner iterations of the character (there are loads of Green Lanterns, a galactic police force that patrols the known and unknown universe) has reportedly been binned, and the show is now being started again from scratch. The focus for the new version will be the 1970s Green Lantern, John Stewart. Finn Wittrock and Jeremy Irvine had already been cast as Scott and Gardner, but they seem to have departed with Grahame-Smith.
This new direction for the series is not directly connected to the arrival, which we reported only this morning, of James Gunn and Peter Safran to oversee the DCEU going forward. But it is part of the same flurry of new-broom house cleaning that has resulted from the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. You may remember that a new Constantine series was ditched in favour of a belated film sequel to the Keanu Reeves movie, and the most high-profile casualty was, of course, the abandonment of the completed Batgirl movie as an apparent tax write-off.
Green Lantern, when it was first announced in 2019, was being trumpeted as the most expensive series produced by HBO Max to date: a space-set saga spanning decades and galaxies. That will now not be the case, and the much smaller and cheaper series, which was supposed to shoot last year, is now back on the drawing board and much further from any eventual release date. Only the original exec-producer Greg Berlanti, who had a hand in the screenplay for the 2011 Ryan Reynolds-starring incarnation, remains attached from the originally announced team.