HBO keeps delivering as DC sticks with the blockbuster chase
HBO’s Lanterns is shining while DC’s movies keep face-planting — so should the studio steer its best stories to streaming instead of theaters?
Week one numbers back up the buzz: Lanterns arrived on HBO with a 95% critics score and 89% audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and pulled in 9.3 million global viewers across its first three days on HBO and Max — the biggest DC Studios premiere on the platform to date. The series is rolling out on Sundays instead of dropping all at once, keeping the conversation going week to week.
Lanterns drew 9.3 million global viewers in its first three days.
The slow-burn approach fits the Green Lantern Corps. These cosmic “space cops” work inside knotty politics and moral gray zones; cramming Hal Jordan and John Stewart’s partnership into a two-hour movie has never served the mythology well. On HBO, the show has room to wrestle with willpower, fear and intergalactic law without rushing the character work.
HBO is where DC is humming
HBO’s playbook — the one that made The Sopranos and Game of Thrones watercooler staples — is paying off for DC. Recent series have landed strong with both critics and viewers, and Lanterns now stands as the highest-rated live-action DCU project so far.
- Peacemaker — 94% on Rotten Tomatoes
- The Penguin — 95%
- Creature Commandos — 93%
- Lanterns — 95% critics, 89% audience
The weekly release strategy — Sundays on HBO, streaming on Max — mirrors the cadence that once kept Game of Thrones in the cultural bloodstream for years. It ’s tailor-made for shows built on character depth and tough choices instead of constant spectacle.
The big-screen picture is shakier
Superman kicked off the rebooted movie slate with $618.7 million worldwide and solid word of mouth for its heartfelt tone and David Corenswet’s take on the icon. Still, it fell shy of the billion‑dollar watermark studios crave for a cornerstone franchise, including just $264 million from overseas markets.
Then came Supergirl in June 2026. It opened to $38 million domestically (below the $55 million projections) and finished with $126.3 million worldwide against a reported $170 million budget — DC’s worst box-office showing since 2004’s Catwoman. The film dropped 62% by its fourth weekend, posted the lowest fourth‑weekend domestic haul in DCU/DCEU history, slid out of the top five faster than The Flash and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and mustered only $54 million overseas.
Warner Bros. Discovery is adjusting. Clayface, a horror‑ leaning Batman villain story, is set for October 2026 with a modest $40 million budget; industry analysts say it needs roughly $100 million worldwide to land in the black — a far lower bar than recent tentpoles.
Match the story to the medium
Some DC sagas belong on HBO. A cosmic police procedural like Lanterns lives on layered world‑building and patient character beats — the same qualities that defined Green Lantern: Rebirth and Geoff Johns’ long‑form runs, or arcs like Secret Origin and Emerald Twilight that unfolded over dozens of issues. Redemption journeys such as Peacemaker and crime epics like The Penguin also thrive with time to breathe.
Theaters, meanwhile, make sense for true events: icons with built‑in gravity and scale, like Superman and the upcoming The Batman Part II. There’s even chatter that Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow — a character study by design — might fit better as a limited series, much as Creature Commandos used animation to tackle darker material.
On the film side, next up is Clayface in October 2026.