Earlier this week, DC Studios released the first trailer for Lanterns, the upcoming HBO series starring Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) as Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre (Krypton) as John Stewart. And as is wont to happen, the internet voiced its frustration.
Some fans were upset that the series, previously described as being inspired by True Detective, was bathed in earth tones and featured no aliens or super-powered ring battles. There were plenty of jokes about the lack of actual green in the Green Lantern show.
Hal briefly flies in the trailer, but isn’t surrounded by an aura of green energy when he does so, which set some people off. That led to another round of posts about how, actually, it isn’t uncommon for Green Lanterns to fly on Earth without an aura (hell, Guy Gardner didn’t have one in Superman).
One thing that everyone seems to forget when these trailers come out, though, is what purpose they actually serve: The point of a trailer is to generate conversation around the show, to generate enthusiasm and hype. But it’s primarily designed to generate those things among the members of the general public. Committed fans, who are already planning to watch (or hate-watch), are a secondary concern when it comes to revealing a first look at an expensive new show.
This has been pointed out many, many times before — but in the American comics market, a successful book can sell 100,000 copies a month. If you sold 100,000 movie tickets for a DC or Marvel movie, it would be catastrophic and everyone involved would be looking for work.
Obviously, that isn’t a fair comparison for a number of different reasons, but the point stands: the few hundred thousand regular comic book readers in the U.S. market aren’t enough to serve as the audience for a successful TV series. Even at their low points, the Arrowverse shows averaged half a million viewers — and during the height of their popularity, it was many multiples of that.
This isn’t to say that, if you’re a fan, you can’t be bummed out or disappointed that you didn’t get the trailer you want. Obviously that’s not a reasonable position to take. But it is to say that if you didn’t get the trailer you expected, maybe that’s because the average consumer of superhero media isn’t the target audience for a TV-MA HBO series — even one based on a comic book.
There’s no guarantee that there will be big space battles in Lanterns, and one could argue that it’s a bad idea to expect them in a show that’s inspired by True Detective and “Hard-Traveling Heroes.” There’s also no guarantee that there won’t be at least one, as evidenced by the fact that Sinestro is a character in the show. Six months out, it’s very possible that most of the visual effects aren’t completed yet, and that these scenes were chosen specifically because they communicate the themes, character arcs, and a loose sense of the visuals without leaning too heavily on CGI that won’t be done until June.
In any case, it’s always good, when these things disappoint you, to take a step back and ask who they’re trying to sell the show to. In this case, if it’s an audience whose only experience with Green Lantern is a movie that failed so hard the star has spent a decade trash-talking it… So maybe it’s not the worst idea to slow-walk the neon green CGI.
Here’s the official logline and credits for Lanterns, per PR from HBO:
Logline: The series follows new recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and Lantern legend Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.
Credits: HBO in association with Warner Bros. Television and DC Studios. The LANTERNS pilot is co-written by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, who are co-creators for the series. Mundy serves as showrunner. The first two episodes are directed by James Hawes, with Stephen Williams, Geeta Vasant Patel and Alik Sakharov also tapped to direct. The series is executive produced by Mundy, Lindelof, James Gunn, Peter Safran, King, Ron Schmidt, and Hawes. Based on the DC comic characters from “Green Lantern.”
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