The Green Lantern series has survived the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, but while the project is still officially a go at HBO Max, some changes have been made ahead of production. According to a new report by THR, series writer and showrunner Seth Grahame-Smith has exited the project amid many changes happening at HBO Max after the merger. Grahame-Smith’s completed scripts for all eight episodes of the planned series have also been scrapped, as the plan is to redevelop Green Lantern from scratch with a much smaller budget in mind.
Previously, it had been reported that Finn Wittrock and Jeremy Irvine had signed on to play the Guy Gardner and Alan Scott incarnations of Green Lantern. It’s not yet clear if the two will still be on board to play those roles, though those characters will no longer be the primary focus of the show. THR reports that the new direction for the Green Lantern series will be to follow the John Stewart version. It’s unknown who will play the character in the show, though Wayne T. Carr appeared as John Stewart in a deleted scene from the DCEU film Justice League.
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The Grahame-Smith version of Green Lantern was ordered under the watch of Walter Hamada, and the decision to switch gears was made after his recent exit. It has since been announced that James Gunn and Peter Safran have been appointed to lead DC Comics-based projects for DC Studios. Meanwhile, Greg Berlanti’s Berlanti Productions is still attached to the project, though executive producer Marc Guggenheim is not involved with this new plan.
The Green Lantern Series Goes Back to the Drawing Board
The Green Lantern series was very ambitious with a big budget attached. Resetting production with a smaller budget in mind is better than giving the series the Batgirl treatment, though it does mean that things will be drastically different from what Grahame-Smith had in mind. Last year, he teased at DC FanDome that the show he was planning was going to be huge, featuring a variety of Green Lanterns with a lot of time spent in outer space.
“Yeah, that show is gigantic,” he said. “It has taken quite a bit of time to get to this point and it’s just a big, big undertaking. It’s going really well. All I can say is that it’s going really well and there are gonna be Green Lanterns in it, and it’s gonna be on HBO Max.”
He added, “We’ll see. It’s gonna be a while before the world gets to see that, but we are very, very busy at work, as we speak.”
Word is that it was Grahame-Smith’s decision to leave the series, and that doesn’t seem so surprising if he was told that all of the work he’s put into his vision over the past year has been for nothing. In any case, Green Lantern is still happening at HBO Max, but there’s no telling yet when the series will arrive on the streaming platform.
