'Lanterns' Spoiled A Major Change To Green Lantern - But We Can Explain

Green Lantern hasn’t exactly had the best transition to film and television. While Nathan Fillion blew it out of the park playing everyone’s favorite lovable jerk, Guy Gardner, last year in Superman (2025), not much else has been done with the Green Lantern Corps. Whenever a Lantern has appeared, it’s usually as a supporting character or a background character, like in Zach Snyder’s Justice League (2021). Now, with the release of the Lanterns trailer, there’s genuine hope that Green Lantern will finally receive the justice he deserves on HBO Max. 

However, shortly after the trailer debuted, fans were already bemoaning the state of Chris Mundy’s TV show solely because of Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern suit. Instead of it being bright green and manifested through space technology, it’s a brown suit hanging in a closet. Not exactly glamorous, and people on social media are taking notice. However, this seemingly significant change isn’t uncommon for the character and actually helps signify how the series will stand apart from other depictions of Hal and the other Earth Lanterns.

Why Green Lantern’s Suit In ‘Lanterns’ Looks So Different

The big thing that is rubbing people the most about the Green Lantern costume isn’t that it’s a brown suit, but that the suit is practical. That may seem like an odd thing to criticize, but given the lore surrounding the Green Lantern costume, it does seem like a valid complaint at first glance.

Typically, a Green Lantern’s costume is a manifestation of their will. Thanks to the power of a Green Lantern’s battery, which is drawn directly from the power of the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum, it allows a Lantern to do anything they want, as long as they have the willpower to do so. Most notably, this allows the various Lanterns to create a suit that allows them to fly through space and perform their duties as a Lantern. Making the suit a physical object as opposed to a manifestation of their will seems to needlessly restrict their capabilities. 

However, Lanterns wouldn’t be the first time that a Green Lantern has worn a physical suit. Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, while not drawing his powers from the same source as Hal, has a physical outfit he wears. Later in the Silver Age of comics, due to inconsistent creative teams and a lack of direct editorial oversight, Hal’s costume was depicted as both a physical suit and an energy construct, depending on the needs of the story. But even if you want to argue that Hal’s suit has never been physical in the modern age, the recent Earth-One duology of graphic novels that began in 2018 made it very clear that Hal’s suit was physical. In fact, Earth-One was stated to be the inspiration for the suit in Lanterns, which lines up with how both stories are far more grounded than the extraterrestrial adventures Hal has been on in series like Green Lantern: The Animated Series (2011).

Is ‘Lanterns’ Overcorrecting After Ryan Reynolds’ Controversial Green Lantern Suit?

It’s also not impossible to think that the reason the suit became physical as opposed to rendered via CGI was because of the ridicule that DC received when Ryan Reynolds donned the suit in Green Lantern (2011). In hindsight, that monstrosity haunted Green Lantern for years to come.

While the decision to make the suit a CG overlay on Ryan Reynolds as a manifestation of his will is comic-accurate, it doesn’t change the fact that, in execution, it looked awful. It made him look like a plastic action figure, and that’s saying something in a movie where the majority of the cast members are composed of CGI. While it’s never been confirmed how and why the suit looks as bad as it does, it’s not impossible to think that Hal’s suit was a casualty of ensuring that Green Lantern could meet its summer 2011 release date, especially considering that the film went over budget. After all, if money had to be taken from somewhere, take it from Ryan Reynolds’ suit as opposed to the large and complex CGI action set pieces. 

Lanterns may have opted to overcorrect the mistakes of Green Lantern. After all, there’s no need to worry about a suit looking bad from dated CGI if there’s no CGI whatsoever! While it probably wasn’t intended to be that way in the conceptual phase of Lanterns, the decision to go practical probably wasn’t met with too much pushback from DC Comics and Warner Bros., given that prior history.

What The New Costume Means For The Green Lantern Corps In Jame Gunn’s DCU

In all likelihood, it seems that the practical suits are the way of Gunn’s DCU. Superman, Peacemaker, and Supergirl were all leads in Gunn’s DCU projects, and all of them had practical suits that helped inform their characters. Guy Gardner’s suit was 100% practical, and while he looked ridiculous, that only accentuated how confident he was in his capabilities as a superhero. He could walk around in that jacket with that haircut and still be a badass. He saw himself as a superhero first, not a space cop, which is what the Green Lantern Corps is. If Lanterns is depicting them as a more coordinated and strict police organization, then it only makes sense that their uniforms reflect that.

Could that change as more colorful and alien Lanterns like Kilowog and Sinestro appear? Probably, but it makes sense here given the more subdued tone of Lanterns. If Hal Jordan and John Stewart were traveling around solving crimes in bright green jumpsuits, it would pull people out of how serious the show intends to present itself as a superhero version of Slow Horses (2022). This could change in future seasons or if Hal starts to appear in other DCU projects, but the brown suit, while not exactly the suit fans want, is the suit that Lanterns most likely needs.