Scott Tipple

So LANTERNS reportedly cost around $160 MILLION, and now we're finding out that a chunk of its visual effects budget went toward making California look like... rural Nebraska? What the hell are we doing here? A new VFX breakdown from CoSA reveals just how much digital work went into the HBO series, including replacing mountains, skies, landscapes, and even the lighting to make California resemble the Great Plains. Hell, they even gave John Stewart a CGI beard. And look, LANTERNS was a good show. I enjoyed it. But for eight episodes that were largely a grounded detective story with relatively limited Green Lantern spectacle, I'm starting to wonder where the hell all that money went. Remember how people kept defending the show's grounded approach as being cheaper than some massive cosmic adventure? Well, if that reported budget is accurate, that argument looks pretty ridiculous now. Meanwhile, I'm watching VISIONQUEST, which is also rumored to have a substantial budget, and I can actually see where the money is going. It's a pretty interesting contrast. And I'm not going to beat the AI drum any more than I already do, but come on. We're living in an era where technology is advancing rapidly enough to potentially make this kind of environmental work faster and cheaper. If we're spending millions digitally recreating forgettable Nebraska landscapes, maybe it's time to reconsider how these productions are being made. Hell, would it have been cheaper to just film the damn thing in Nebraska? I'm not saying the VFX artists did bad work. Quite the opposite. The fact that most people never noticed the digital alterations is a testament to their talent. But impressive work doesn't automatically mean the production was financially efficient. At some point, somebody at DC Studios needs to explain how an eight-episode, largely earthbound Green Lantern detective series potentially costs $160 million. Because if this is what the cheaper, more grounded approach looks like, I'd hate to see the bill for an actual Green Lantern space opera.