New Lanterns teaser finally starts getting into the rings

The latest TV offering from the DCU arrives in August.

By Drew Gillis  |  May 18, 2026 | 12:30pm
Image courtesy of HBO
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New Lanterns teaser finally starts getting into the rings

If the last teaser for HBO’s Lanterns was shockingly down-to-Earth, the second one, released this morning, really follows through on the promise of superheroes and alien technology. From the beginning of the new clip, we’re seeing the Green Lantern rings and forcefields and explosions, all the kinds of things we might expect to see in a joint belonging to James Gunn’s DCU. Of course, there’s also the kind of banter between Hal Jordan and John Stewart (Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre, respectively) that we’d also expect to see here. 

Even so, Lanterns is still decidedly Earth-bound, especially compared to the next big DC project on the horizon, Supergirl. “Supergirl especially is a space adventure. It’s like Guardians. Lanterns is its own thing. There’s just a longer, sort of a bigger world we’re building with all these different pieces and they do all come together and intersect sometimes in a story fashion and sometimes just in a, you know, ‘here’s another piece of the world’ fashion,” Gunn told Rolling Stone at the end of Peacemaker‘s second season last October. “Lanterns is really important in setting up things.”

Lanterns, which also stars Kelly Macdonald, Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, Laura Linney, Jason Ritter, Ulrich Thomsen, Nathan Fillion, J. Alphonse Nicholson, and Jasmine Cephas Jones, debuts on HBO and HBO Max on August 16. 

 
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