James Gunn Was Pretty Hands off With ‘Lanterns’ Thanks to ‘Superman'

We are several days removed from the premiere of Lanterns, and I’m finding myself wanting to watch it again. My schedule is all over the place for a variety of reasons, so my wife and I have to be very selective about what we watch because we just don’t have that much time. And some nights, we just want to stare at the wall until we drift off to sleep from pure exhaustion. All that to say, there’s not a lot of rewatching going on. But, dagnabbit, I really liked Lanterns.

To be fair, I’m a sucker for the DCU, and I still remember the horrors of the 2011 movie. This show would have had to be pretty terrible to lose me. But luckily, it was more than that. The mystery is fun, the acting is fantastic (Kyle Chandler, y’all!), and it’s doing its own thing with the Green Lantern mythos, which I think is a lot of fun. Also, I want James Gunn’s DCU to do well, and it already had a pretty big flop this year with Supergirl. Coincidentally enough, according to reports, Gunn was much more involved with that one.

This is not an attempt to point fingers, nor to place blame in any particular camp. It’s more something I found interesting, as I cover a lot of this stuff for this site, and sometimes things line up in interesting ways. In this case, a report from THR claimed that Supergirl was plagued with issues, and a lot of that stemmed from disagreements between Gunn and director Craig Gillespie. While some claimed their relationship was normal director/eecutive stuff, what matters is that Gunn was definitely involved in that one. Lanterns? Maybe not so much.

In a recent interview with THR, Lanterns showrunner Chris Mundy claims that Gunn was relatively hands-off with the show as he was cape-deep in a different DCU project. “At the very beginning, James was off doing Superman. He was in the trenches. So while he would come in for high-level stuff, there was a fair amount of trust that he was gracious enough to give us,” Mundy explained to the outlet. “We knew we were putting John on his feet, but there wasn’t an actual story point that we had to land him on. We weren’t shoehorned into anything at all.”

This could all be a simple coincidence, but it’s undeniable that Lanterns was incredibly well-received while Supergirl floundered. The former seems to have had minimal Gunn involvement, save for some big decisions that I’m sure will affect the universe, while the latter had Gunn allegedly trying to make song choices over the director. It could just be that Lanterns was in a better place when it started production, and Gunn felt that he needed to lend his expertise to a Supergirl movie that wasn’t ready yet, but that kind of makes his whole “make sure we have finished scripts” thing feel… suspect.

There’s also the chance that Lanterns doesn’t stick the landing, even though Damon Lindelof has already tried to give some assurances to the contrary. At the very least, the central mystery will allegedly be solved. But Mundy mentions in the THR report that he is breaking story for season 2, so there will probably be more story to tell. There will be more Supergirl stories, too, as Milly Alcock will be in Man of Tomorrow, which Gunn is completely in charge of, and will feature Aaron Pierre as well.