Director Francis Lawrence has brought the Hunger Games franchise to the big screen and will be continuing his involvement with the series with the upcoming prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, starring Rachel Zegler. However, back in 2005, the director made an impressive feature debut with the movie adaptation of the DC comic Hellblazer, with the Keanu Reeves horror-action vehicle, Constantine. Fans of the film had been clamoring for a sequel since, but none has come to fruition. However, 2014 brought the character to an NBC series that would only last one season.
According to BingeHulu, Lawrence recently gave an interview with GameSpot, in which he updated readers on the state of Constantine 2, that had been in development for quite a long time. Lawrence mentions, “So Constantine 2 got obviously held up by the writers’ strike. And we had to jump through a bunch of hurdles to get control of the character again, because other people had control of the Vertigo stuff. We have control. Keanu and Akiva Goldsman and I have been in meetings and have been hashing out what we think the story is going to be, and there’s more meetings of those that have to happen–the script has to be written–but really hoping that we get to do Constantine 2, and make a real rated R version of it.”
Lawrence had divulged updates in spurts over the years as the creatives attempted to put together the sequel. Last year, the director told Collider his issues with the ratings board when he made the first film and why he’s ready to make a hard R-rated movie with the sequel. “One of the biggest things for me about the first one was we followed, per Warner Bros., the rules to make a PG-13 movie in terms of violence, blood, language, sexuality. But the ratings board gave us a hard R based on their the gray zone of intensity. And my big, big regret was that we have an R-rated movie that’s really a PG-13 movie. And if I was going to have to go have an R, I would have really made an R-rated movie. I would have made it much scarier and much more violent and I would have really made an R-rated movie.”