'Lanterns' Just Officially Settled a Major Question About the New DCU’s Canon

Published Sep 20, 2026, 9:15 PM EDT Corey is an Associate Editor with Polygon that oversees the Tabletop Gaming section with a special emphasis on Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. A forever Dungeon Master who's built his own homebrew fantasy universe, Corey has also been playing Magic for more than 25 years. He's been writing about various forms of entertainment media for more than 15 years. Seven of those were spent at Inverse where he covered TV, film, and video games, eventually growing into the role of Associate Gaming Editor. Corey also has bylines at Kotaku, IGN, Vulture, Fanbyte, and more. John Stewart’s random reference settles one of James Gunn’s messiest continuity questions Lanterns just sneakily referenced the wildest DC movie ever Image: Warner Bros. Sign in to your Polygon.com account One of the earliest scenes in Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice returns to the big climactic battle from Man of Steel. This time, we see it from Bruce Wayne’s perspective on the street, where collapsing buildings and crashing Kryptonians look less like superhero spectacle and more like mass destruction. It raised an interesting question that James Gunn's DC Universe has yet to answer: What is it like to be a normal person in this superhero world? In episode 6 of HBO’s Lanterns, the show wisely asks what regular people are doing to prepare for this kind of large-scale destruction in a DCU where it seems to happen regularly. A throwaway reference early in the episode quietly confirms one such event — and essentially canonizes another DC movie that was fairly murky before. Warning: Spoilers for Lanterns episode 6 follow. Ten years after handing Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern ring over to the Guardians, John Stewart has become an architect and founded Stewart Brothers in Midway City. The episode opens with him delivering a presentation to local government representatives that is essentially a series of football-stadium-sized panic rooms large enough to protect the city’s four million residents. "We all saw what happened in Metropolis, right?” he asks. “But our city doesn't have a Superman." Then he wonders aloud what people might do the next time “a giant starfish” starts wreaking havoc. That’s not a throwaway hypothetical. Starro’s rampage, previously depicted in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, apparently also happened in the new DCU. Is The Suicide Squad canon in the new DCU? The continuity surrounding The Suicide Squad has always been deliberately fuzzy. The 2021 movie was released as part of the old DC Extended Universe launched by Snyder, before Gunn and Peter Safran took control of DC Studios and rebooted the franchise. Several of its characters and storylines were carried forward into Peacemaker, Creature Commandos, and the new DCU, but Gunn has resisted declaring that the entire movie happened exactly as audiences saw it. “Only Creature Commandos forward is pure canon,” Gunn explained on Bluesky. He described Peacemaker as largely consistent with the new continuity and called The Suicide Squad “an imperfect memory.” That means events from the older movies can become canon individually when a new DCU production acknowledges them. Discussing references in Creature Commandos, Gunn put the rule plainly in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: Once the new series talks about something from The Suicide Squad or Peacemaker, “those things automatically become canon.” Under that rule, Lanterns confirms that a giant alien starfish attacked Earth before 2026. John’s phrasing treats the attack as a real and widely understood historical event. It is an obvious reference to Starro, who escaped the Jötunheim laboratory in The Suicide Squad and rampaged through Corto Maltese before Bloodsport, Harley Quinn, Ratcatcher 2, King Shark, and Polka-Dot Man fought it. Image: Warner Bros. That does not necessarily make every detail of The Suicide Squad part of the DCU, but it does strongly indicate that some kind of Suicide Squad fought and defeated Starro. The events presented in the movie might not neatly match up with what’s considered canon at this point. Gunn’s “imperfect memory” description implies that plenty of the finer details might differ. But we do know that the event happened. John Stewart never stopped building shields The reference also does a bit more for Lanterns than settle a continuity argument. John’s presentation shows how ordinary people and the institutions they’re a part of are responding to a world with superheroes, kaiju, and aliens. Metropolis has Superman. Midway City has four million people and nothing to protect them — at least until John finally decides to wear the ring. All of this makes the Starro reference both a clear piece of DCU canon and a revealing update on John’s life. He may have walked away from the Green Lantern Corps, but he never stopped designing ways to save people.