HBO’s Lanterns has turned into the latest flashpoint in the online culture war over Hollywood, with prominent anti-woke YouTube reviewers, led by The Critical Drinker, drawing sharp pushback from other creators who argue the criticism ignores decades of Green Lantern comics history.
What The Critical Drinker Said
The Critical Drinker, the Scottish YouTuber (real name Will Jordan) whose channel has more than 2 million subscribers, posted a review titled “Lanterns – A Superhero Show That Hates Superheroes,” arguing the series was slow, joyless, and more interested in message than in the source material. He’s built a large following, and a media career that now includes Fox News appearances, largely on videos framing modern franchise television and film as overrun by ideological messaging at the expense of storytelling.
The Pushback: ‘You Don’t Know the Comics’
A wave of response videos, with titles like “Debunking The Critical Drinker’s Lanterns Review” and “Exposing the Grift: The Critical Drinker Lies About Lanterns,” argue his complaints misread the show as a woke invention rather than a fairly faithful adaptation of Green Lantern’s actual comic book history.
The central character at the center of the dispute is John Stewart, the architect-turned-Green Lantern played in the HBO series alongside Hal Jordan. Critics of the backlash point out that Stewart isn’t a modern diversity addition: he was created in 1971 by writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams, appearing in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #87 as one of the first Black superheroes in mainstream comics, at a time when the book was explicitly using the character to grapple with race and class in America. Stewart has anchored Green Lantern stories, and led the Green Lantern Corps, for more than 50 years, including as the version of the character voiced by Phil LaMarr in the 2000s Justice League animated series watched by an entire generation of fans.
A Familiar Pattern
The dispute echoes previous rounds of the same fight, and The Critical Drinker’s own back catalog is a big part of the pattern. Anti-woke creators also built large audiences criticizing Amazon’s Rings of Power, Disney’s Star Wars sequels, and 2025’s live-action Snow White remake for perceived ideological messaging, while other critics countered that the objections often targeted casting or thematic choices with long precedent in the source material.
The Critical Drinker isn’t alone, and isn’t even the loudest voice in this recurring fight. The same pattern played out over Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey, after the director cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page in the ensemble. Commentator Matt Walsh argued Nolan only made the casting choice out of fear of being called racist, and Elon Musk amplified the backlash to his hundreds of millions of followers, accusing Nolan of losing his “integrity”:
Nyong’o has pushed back publicly, calling the reaction racist and declining to spend her time “thinking of a defense,” while Nolan has said he’s adapting Homer the way Kurosawa adapted Shakespeare, for the culture making it rather than as a museum piece.
Milly Alcock’s Supergirl drew a similarly pointed response, with The Critical Drinker posting a video titled “MELTSDOWN in SEXIST Supergirl Rant” and another arguing modern female superheroes come off as “stoic, unlikable, vapid, cardboard cutouts.” Alcock herself has said in interviews that she expected backlash simply for being a woman leading two major franchises at once.
James Gunn’s 2025 Superman became a flashpoint after Gunn described the Man of Steel as “the story of America,” an immigrant who came from other places and populated the country. Former screen Superman Dean Cain seized on the comment as proof the film had “gone woke,” predicting it would hurt the box office, even though critics quickly pointed out Cain’s own 1990s series had Superman needing a green card:
The Critical Drinker’s own review of the finished Superman movie, notably, focused mainly on its tone and pacing rather than politics.
And when Anthony Mackie, promoting Captain America: Brave New World, said he didn’t think the shield should represent “America” specifically so much as honor, dignity, and dependability, The Critical Drinker responded by dubbing him “Captain Anti-America,” a label that spread widely online even after Mackie walked the comment back, calling himself “a proud American.”
Supporters of this style of criticism argue they’re reviewing story execution and casting logic, not attacking people for their politics, and that pointing out an adaptation leans on identity or message doesn’t require ignoring whether the film or show is well made. Critics counter that the through-line across Helen of Troy, Supergirl, Superman, Captain America, and now Lanterns is less about craft than about which casting and thematic choices get flagged as “woke” in the first place, regardless of how much comic or literary precedent actually backs them up.
Why It Matters
Lanterns has performed well by HBO’s own numbers, ranking among its most-watched titles since premiering, even as the online argument over it has generated millions of views on its own. The dispute is less about whether any single review is fair and more about a recurring split in how large YouTube audiences are taught to read comic book adaptations: as ideological Trojan horses versus as adaptations of characters and storylines that, in Green Lantern’s case, were built around race and identity from the start.
