Fifteen years is a long time to live down a bad movie. Ryan Reynolds' 2011 Green Lantern still hasn't quite managed it, but HBO Max subscribers are giving it a second look anyway, and the reason has nothing to do with nostalgia.

The film is currently sitting at number eight on HBO Max's most-watched chart in the US, according to Collider. That's a strange place to find a movie that critics tore apart on release and that barely scraped past its own budget, pulling in $219 million worldwide against a $200 million spend. Not a disaster by accounting standards, exactly, but close enough that it effectively shelved any Green Lantern film plans for over a decade.

What changed is Lanterns, HBO's new series set in James Gunn's rebooted DC universe. Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King, it stars Kyle Chandler as an older, grittier Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as rookie recruit John Stewart. The show has been the most-watched title on HBO Max in the US for more than two weeks running and currently holds the number one spot globally, per Collider's reporting.

Critics are actually on board this time

Unlike the 2011 film, Lanterns is getting the kind of coverage a studio dreams about. Collider's own review scored it 8/10. ScreenRant's Felipe Rangel called it the moment James Gunn's DCU "enters its brightest day," and the comparisons to True Detective, tonally at least, keep showing up across the reviews cited by Collider. Whatever HBO is doing with this one, it's landing.

And that success appears to be pulling curious viewers back toward the character's messier screen history. People who've never seen the 2011 film, or who watched it once and moved on, seem to be circling back now that Hal Jordan is suddenly must-discuss television again. Streaming charts work that way. A hit show can drag an unrelated back-catalogue title along with it just because the algorithm and the search bar point people in that direction.

It's a minor redemption arc, if you can call it that. Green Lantern isn't getting reappraised as a good film. Nobody's arguing that. But it is getting watched, which is more than anyone expected of it in 2026.

The timing lines up with a broader stretch of superhero dominance across formats. Spider-Man: Brand New Day crossed $2 billion globally in just 17 days, the second-fastest run to that number in box office history, and Avengers: Doomsday is already drawing predictions that it could go further still. Add in Spider-Noir and the final season of The Boys, both strong performers this year according to Collider, and it's clear studios and streamers alike are riding a genuinely busy stretch for the genre.

Whether HBO leans into that momentum with more Green Lantern material, a second season announcement for Lanterns, or simply lets the old film's chart run play out on its own remains to be seen. For now, Hal Jordan has two very different versions of himself competing for attention on the same platform, and only one of them was supposed to work.