"It bewitched me": Lanterns helmer makes his feelings known about the script of the upcoming DCU show

It looks like HBO's upcoming Lanterns series is doing everything right by the characters compared to the previous live-action adaptation of the Green Lantern Corps. The series is in popular conversation almost every week as more actors join the stacked cast of the HBO series.

The latest update comes from James Hawes, who will be directing the first two episodes of the show.

Recently, on July 11, 2025, Hawes sat down for an interview with Collider's Editor-in-chief Steve Weintraub to promote the former's new movie The Amateur. James Hawes shared some interesting details about the Lanterns series. Before speaking about the Green Lantern series, he looked back on his previous work with Max (Then HBO Max), saying:

"I’ve worked with the team at HBO Max three times before. I set up Snowpiercer with Sarah Aubrey and Joey Chavez, and I'd worked with them on The Alienist and Raised by Wolves."

Speaking about the writing team behind the series, Hawes continued:

"There is a very particular humor that they brought to this. It's very rooted in a way that I like to think we achieve with Slow Horses, that I achieve with things like my Black Mirror's, and yet there is a rich vein of humor running through it. So, again, it was about that tone. I'm such a huge fan of Damon [Lindelof] and Chris [Mundy] and the writing that they've done in the past."

Prasing the script of the series, the director said:

"Listen, it all starts from the script. When you turn those pages, can you get the smell of it? You always find a scene or two that you think, 'I can't wait to be stood beside the camera and the cast, directing this scene on the day.' If that happens on turning the pages, you know this is something you have to take seriously, and that absolutely happened with Lanterns. To some extent, it's a swerve. Superheroes are not somewhere I've really played before, but it's created in such a way—and I can't tell you much—that it bewitched me."

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What do James Hawes' comments mean for Lanterns?

James Hawes' comments echo the sentiment that James Gunn expressed back in 2023, when the Lanterns series was first announced, a grounded and realistic show in the vein of another HBO hit, True Detective. But that doesn't mean that the HBO series will ignore the cosmic sci-fi elements of the Green Lantern comics. Hawes, acknowledging the sci-fi elements, described the tone of the series as:

"It doesn't lack its sci-fi magic, but it's done in a world where you accept that these things just are. They don't need that extra sprinkle of sci-fi fairy dust. It works within a physical world that we've come to know."

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Lanterns will air on HBO sometime in the first half of 2026. This was confirmed by Gunn in a press conference last month.