While several incarnations of the character have existed since his creation in 1940, the Warner Bros. movie will focus on the Lantern embodied by Hal Jordan, a test pilot who finds a downed alien spacecraft. A dying alien passes his ring to Jordan, introducing the man to a wider world that includes an interstellar police force known as the Green Lantern Corps and its overseers, the Guardians of the Universe, who live on the planet Oa.

Like any superhero, the Lantern has a weakness, the color yellow, and was known for reciting an oath when charging his ring. "To me, this was on the last great comic book movie that hasn't been made," said Berlanti, who grew up reading comics in the 1980s. "It was a comic book with a real mythology that you would see in a lot of the space operas and the sci-fi books. The best part about it, anybody can be become one of the Green Lanterns because anyone can end up with that ring."

*****

The biggest challenge in setting up "Lantern" was waiting for the technology to become available to create fantastical worlds as well as overcoming the prejudice of a ring-bearing hero. "The danger and the fear from a lot of people is that it would be silly," said Berlanti. "In these post-'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings' days, it's not any more fantastical than that. It's taken movies like that to make it feel as if a Green Lantern film is possible."