DC is working on huge new superhero series – 13 years after its major movie flop

Never has the word greenlit been more appropriate – reports this week indicate that DC and HBO are going to team up on a new TV series called Lanterns, bringing the story of Green Lantern to screens once again.

This comes some 13 years after the box office dud that was the Ryan Reynolds film, something that basically killed off the character's chances for a decade or more. 

Now HBO will create an eight-episode series focussing on Hal Jordan and John Stewart, two members of the Green Lantern Corps. For those who don't know, that's a sort of intergalactic peace-keeping force that wields the power of supernatural rings. 

Interestingly, we might not be getting too crazy and intergalactic a story, though. The show's description says the two characters will be "two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland."

With executive producersw who've worked on the likes of Game of Thrones and True Detective, too, it seems like DC Studios might be keen to take things in a more interesting direction, with an Earth-bound plot to drive things. 

This won't be our first glimpse of a Green Lantern character under DC's new supreme leaders, co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran, either. He's already confirmed that the first big new DC movie, Superman, will feature Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, a different member of the corps. 

That movie is primed to release next summer, but with no casting announcements having been made yet it seems like Lanterns is probably a good way longer off. Superman is currently in the middle of filming, in fact, as has been repeatedly confirmed by set leaks and location shooting that have revealed Superman's new suit and a few other characters' designs. 

Gunn and Safran said about the Lanterns series: "John Stewart and Hal Jordan are two of DC’s most compelling characters, and Lanterns brings them to life in an original detective story that is a foundational part of the unified DCU we’re launching next summer with Superman."

The show will presumably come straight to HBO Max and potentially to Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK, confirming HBO's attempts to be the best streaming service for mystery and detective show fans.  

Now, all that's left is for lovers of the Green Lantern comics to strap in for an anxious wait to see what those livid green suits look like this time around – and to hope that DC doesn't go for an all-CGI design like the one that famously hamstrung the Reynolds film.