‘Lanterns’ doesn’t have cosmic voyages for one simple reason: lack of money

When the first trailer for Lanterns dropped, criticism rained down on it. It was gray, it was missing fights, nobody understood the True Detective-style dynamic… And a few of us were saying, off in a corner, that if Damon Lindelof and Tom King were handling the series, our job was to sit down and wait instead of judging just some trailer. And of course, time has proved us right.

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There’s no money for this case

Now we’ve learned why this setting is so earthbound: apparently, HBO tried to make it that way to keep costs down, no matter how much the executive producers wanted to go off into space and do the usual Green Lantern flourishes: “They kept sending us notes saying they wanted True Detective with power rings”. And when the boss calls the shots, that’s that.

So this wasn’t James Gunn’s original vision, but the creator has had no choice but to put up with it. It’ll be worse, mind you, if the season works, because with a second season they’ll lose one of their biggest strengths. There are sources saying they’re already working on the scripts, even without HBO’s approval… And it’ll be, in any case, without Lindelof, who’s already making his next series, The Chain. I wouldn’t risk following a Lindelof series without him, honestly.

On top of that, Tom King won’t have any say either, because he’ll already have gone off to the writers’ room of the Mr. Miracle animated series. Basically, everything points to it being best if it ends after one season, with or without space travel.