Upcoming DC show Lanterns may revolve around a pair of Green Lanterns, but from what we've seen so far, it's going to remain a far more grounded murder mystery than expected.
For showrunner Chris Mundy, that decision to step away from the more cosmic reaches of Green Lantern lore in favor of a more True Detective-style investigation in dusty Nebraska was made from the jump.
"We just committed pretty early,” Mundy told SFX. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, should we do it this way?’ [We said] ‘We’re going to do it this way.’ So we just started building it. In that way we were all in from the beginning."
Mundy continued, "We wanted to make sure that we were firmly walking the Earth first, and then hopefully you can build those relationships, and that trust inside the show, and you can keep doing more and more."
That 'more and more' has already been hinted at in the second Lanterns trailer released during SDCC weekend. That fresh glimpse won over jaded fans with its imaginative use of the Lantern ring, tease of Sinestro, and what appeared to be a sprinkling of interstellar-set scenes. For Mundy, the sky isn't the limit. It goes far beyond that.
"We’d be stupid not to use everything that you can do inside the Green Lantern universe," Mundy said. "They have these abilities. They have the ring. Their world is just bigger, and the way we use our storytelling can be bigger too. We sometimes had to remind ourselves that there’s as much or as little sci-fi in it as we want there to be.”
Lanterns revolves around Lantern-in-training John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) being mentored by Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) as they uncover clues in a series of killings. The DCU series hits HBO on August 16.
For more, check out what we know about DCU Chapter One.
