Before Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King got the greenlight to bring a Green Lantern series called Lanterns to HBO, Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim was going to be one of the writers/showrunners behind a Green Lantern series for HBO Max. The show as originally envisioned was going to span multiple timelines, and oh yes – all eight scripts for the first season had been written.
At Warner Bros. and DC, though, there was a change of plans, and then Lanterns came about under the new DC Studios regime.
“It was going to be great,” Marc Guggenheim told the Showrunner Whisperer podcast in an interview posted today. He revealed that “James Mangold’s go-to production designer” was taking that role for Green Lantern and Laura Jean Shannon, whose costumes could be seen on series such as The Boys, was going to do the costuming.
“You should see those costumes, by the way,” Guggenheim teased. “Not a single bit of CG in any of them! I have the designs on my phone! Oh, God, they looked amazing,” he added. (Guggenheim was involved with the Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds, where sadly the costume was all CG). “The production art, it would blow you away. Honestly, it looked incredible, like a movie. We had an amazing writing staff,;we’d written all eight scripts of the first season, so I know what the show would have been. It was going to be emotional and exciting with two different time periods and some incredibly strong character work that was very true to the franchise of Green Lantern,” he continued.
“Unfortunately, that’s the reality of doing TV in the 2020s. You can write an entire season of television and not shoot a frame. It didn’t always used to be that way. But it is that way now, and it takes a lot of self control some days to avoid going on Instagram or Twitter and be like, ‘This is what you could have had’,” Marc lamented. “We had some really, really cool plans. It’s a bummer, that’s all I will say.”
You can view the latest Showrunner Whisperer podcast below.
