When Lanterns lands on HBO this Sunday, it closes out a development story that’s run for nearly seven years, absorbed at least four creative approaches, and outlasted more executives than most shows manage episodes. It’s also the first live-action series developed start to finish under James Gunn and Peter Safran, making it the clearest test yet of whether the DCU can hold a TV audience like it does a multiplex one.
The slate revealed by the pair at the start of 2024 has now thinned out considerably, and a new report during Lanterns‘ premiere week suggests that the attrition still has some way to go. The Authority went on ice, Swamp Thing drifted, and David Jenkins’ version of Booster Gold was shelved at the end of July.
Now, two more titles from that original lineup have reportedly gone the same way. According to The Ankler‘s Lesley Goldberg, both Waller and Paradise Lost are dead at DC Studios, becoming casualties of the “noisy early slate” Gunn and Safran built their tenure on. DC Studios has not addressed either publicly.
Waller has had the longer and perhaps more visible struggle out of the two, after being announced in 2023 as a Peacemaker spin-off with Viola Davis returning as Amanda Waller. It was to be scripted by Christal Henry and Jeremy Carver and was substantially rewritten after the labor disputes of that year reshaped the DCU timeline underneath it. As such, the show never quite regained its momentum, though Gunn still said the studio was “working on” it around the time of Peacemaker’s final season. Davis, for her part, has kept the character in circulation regardless, voicing her in Creature Commandos while waiting for news on her own star vehicle.
Paradise Lost, until now, looked a little healthier. The Themyscira-set prequel, which was pitched as Game of Thrones with Amazons but no Wonder Woman, was declared dead by insider chatter earlier this year, only for Gunn to shoot those reports down with a flat “definitely not” via his Threads account. His words were “extreme development” as recently as April, and writers Kira Snyder and Janet Lin were reported to have joined the project in June. Nevertheless, its loss leaves the DCU’s Wonder Woman plans resting entirely on Ana Nogueira’s reboot script, with a newly imagined Themyscira now unlikely to reach the screen before Diana herself is ready to show up.
The gap between the public reassurance from Gunn and the producers and what is actually happening internally is growing wider, and this story lands at an awkward moment. DC is among the more consequential assets in Paramount Skydance’s proposed $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, and the studio is coming off a summer in which Supergirl underperformed despite Superman‘s success in 2025.
Lanterns itself isn’t out of the woods yet, either, as HBO has not yet renewed it despite — per the same report — a co-showrunner already having been hired for the second season. Numbers from Sunday’s premiere will likely lead to some big decisions.
- Release Date
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August 16, 2026
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Chris Mundy
