Is HBO’s Lanterns Setting Up the DCU’s Blackest Night?

HBO’s upcoming TV series Lanterns will be approaching DC’s Green Lantern lore from a True Detective-style angle, with two Green Lanterns, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart, investigating “a terrestrial-based mystery that leads into the overall story that we’re telling throughout the different movies and television shows,” DC Studios head James Gunn has teased. In his longer explanation, Gunn used more specific wording, teasing that Hal and John will discover “this ancient horror on Earth, and these guys are basically supercops on ‘Precinct Earth.’”

Further details about Lanterns have revealed that the show is in part inspired by the “Sinestro’s Law” arc from DC’s 2016 Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps: Rebirth one-shot, as well as Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps issues #1-7, which saw Sinestro and his Yellow Lanterns impose their own form of martial law over the universe, while the Green Lantern Corps is suffering one of its worst eras ever, with Oa their homeworld replaced by a version of the brutal “Warword” that is run by Sinestro, Hal’s former Green Lantern mentor/partner who went rogue and mastered the yellow light of fear as his weapon. 

However, Green Lantern comics fans know that another big story featuring Sinestro creating his own “Sinestro Corps” set the stage for a much larger DC crossover storyline called “Blackest Night.” One growing theory is DC Studios will mix and meld several iconic Green Lantern storylines to create a new DCU version of Blackest Night. 

What Is DC’s Blackest Night? 

In the “Blackest Night” crossover, (2009-2010), Sinestro and his Sinestro Corps’ war with the Green Lanterns begins the fulfillment of a prophecy that sees, an entire spectrum of colored power rings (and the emotions they channel) awakened in the universe – including a set of black rings, which re-animated corpses in service to the Nekron, lord of the dead. Those zombified Black Lanterns killed various DC heroes, who then became part of the Black Lantern Corps. The entire galaxy was under siege by the black rings, Nekron, and his followers; the DC heroes had to band together with the various different Lantern corps (Green, Yellow, Red, Blue, Orange, Indigo, Violet) to create a “White Lantern Corps” which resurrected some of the dead heroes and gave them the power to annihilate the black rings. 

Why Blackest Night Could Be Good For The DCU

This first arc of the new DC Universe saga has been titled “Gods and Monsters” and Blackest Night is definitely a culminating event that epitomizes those two ideas. It’s also an ambitious swing to take, as Gunn and DC Studios are seemingly taking an “In medias res” approach to its shared universe franchise, with an entire history of events already in place. Blackest Night could be the kind of shift that brings back heroes who died before we make our way into the DCU, while shocking fans by kiling off other heroes they thought would be more prominent in the franchise. 

It would also be an event that’s earned over the course of the many projects that are coming out, as each one only needs to tease the idea that some nefarious force is toying with the entire dynamics of life and death, before we found out it’s DCU Nekron and the black rings. In fact, it would be interesting to see if death and resurrection are part of Gunn’s Superman (2025) movie, which could initially present the Man of Steel’s conquer of death as a Christ-like phenomenon, before it’s revealed to be something darker. 

Lanterns is in development and will air on HBO and stream on Max.