Lanterns: Should the DCU’s Hal Jordan Be Older?

James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Universe is set to flourish in some significant ways in the next few years, with a number of movies and television shows inspired by the publisher’s iconic characters. The first new television series under that banner is set to be Lanterns, a live-action take on the Green Lantern mythos being written and produced by Damon Lindelof, Tom King, and Chris Mundy. On Monday, we got our first potential casting details surrounding the project, as multiple outlets indicated that Josh Brolin — who has previously starred as Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cable in Fox’s X-Men Universe, and Jonah Hex in Warner Bros.’ ill-received 2010 standalone movie — has been offered the role of Hal Jordan / Green Lantern. 

Granted, these rumors are far from confirmation that Brolin will ultimately play Hal — the chatter has not been addressed by Gunn or anyone involved with the series, and an “offer” does not necessarily mean that other actors aren’t also in contention. Still, if there is any truth to the rumors, the 56-year-old Brolin being in the conversation provides an indication of the kind of age range DC Studios might be wanting for Hal. That then raises the question — should Hal Jordan be introduced older than his typical superhero prime in the DCU?

The ages of comic book heroes and villains are usually pretty nebulous, to account for the “sliding scale” of decades of stories many of them have appeared in, so there isn’t an exact definition of Hal’s age in the comics. But his comic tenure, particularly his origin of becoming a test pilot and then accidentally being chosen as the next Green Lantern, has usually painted him in his twenties and thirties. There have been some outlying exceptions — Green Lantern: Earth One, which has been used as a visual reference to promote the Lanterns series, seems to portray Hal as slightly older. The same can be said for his tenure as the evil Parallax, during which he sported a silver-white streak of hair on his sideburns. But by and large, when fans picture the character of Hal, he is relatively close to the prime age range of his fellow Justice Leaguers.

Despite this, there have also been multiple attempts to cast Hal as seasoned in past ill-fated Green Lantern projects, with everyone from Mark Wahlberg to Tom Cruise being rumored or suggested by fans over the years. While none of these suggestions ever came to pass, they made sense in a vacuum — to make Hal a contemporary to some of the more established heroes and villains in the previous DCEU, to heighten the age difference between him and his fellow Green Lantern, John Stewart, and to differentiate from the Day One origin story of Ryan Reynolds’ Hal in 2011’s infamous Green Lantern movie.

But in Gunn and Safran’s new DCU, there’s the question of whether or not those same objectives need to be met. The existing casting for DCU heroes has definitely leaned into a multigenerational bent, with David Corenswet’s Clark Kent / Superman somewhere in the middle in his late 20s or early 30s. Even the Green Lantern casting we already have in the franchise, 53-year-old Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, has already skewed older than he is traditionally portrayed in the comics, but could potentially be explained away based on how the DCU handles the Justice League and the Justice League International. If Hal is ultimately portrayed in his 40s or 50s in the DCU, it could allow for some of his history to potentially be already baked in, but at the cost of fans getting to see some of those storylines and relationships possibly play out onscreen. It could also fundamentally change Hal’s relationship with John, going from a slight difference in ages and life experiences (both as men and as Green Lanterns) and into a full-on generational gap. 

That brings us to the third of those aforementioned objectives — providing audiences with something different from 2011’s Green Lantern. An argument can be made that, just because that movie was a critical and financial failure upon its release, that doesn’t mean the next live-action Green Lantern adaptation needs to zigzag into the complete opposite territory. Almost fifteen years after that movie’s release, the majority of audiences remember its overall reputation (and the jokes at its expense in Reynolds’ Deadpool movies) more than any actual specifics of the film’s plot. Those who do still remember Green Lantern‘s plot recognize that it only scratched the surface of what Hal’s mythos is, much less the larger Lantern mythos. If a modern live-action Hal Jordan were to also be in his early days or in his prime, it wouldn’t necessarily retread the same ground — if anything, it would be a second chance to do things right. It calls to mind the thesis of Patrick H. Willems’ 2018 video on modern adaptations of Robin Hood and King Arthur — it’s often unnecessary to subvert something that general audiences aren’t already familiar with. 

That being said, all of this discourse around the casting of DCU Hal Jordan is still missing a lot of context — for starters, context on whether or not it’s actually true. But if it is, there still are the questions of what the franchise’s larger history looks like, what the history of the Justice League looks like, and what role Hal could have in Gunn and Safran’s larger story. It’s also worth mentioning that Lindelof has experience expertly following up on DC superheroes decades after their prime, as evident by Jean Smart’s Emmy-nominated take on Laurie Blake / Silk Spectre in Watchmen. We’ll ultimately have to wait and see what the future holds — both for Hal Jordan, and for the actor who ends up playing him.