It’s been twenty years since the release of Constantine, but the chances of a sequel have never looked more promising. While speaking with Inverse, Keanu Reeves said they recently pitched Constantine 2 to DC Studios, and now they’re moving ahead on the script.
“We’ve been trying to make this film for over a decade, and we just recently put a story together and pitched it to DC Studios and they said, ‘Okay,’” Reeves said. “So, we’re going to try and write a script.” As you might expect, Reeves didn’t drop any hint as to what type of story the sequel will tell, only to confirm that it will be set in the same world as the original. “We’re not going off that,” he said. “John Constantine’s going to be tortured even more.“
The original Constantine movie was released in 2005 and grossed a respectable $230.9 million on a $70-100 million budget. The movie found Constantine helping an LAPD detective (Rachel Weisz) prove that her sister’s death wasn’t a suicide but was, in fact, something much more sinister.
Director Francis Lawrence is set to return for the sequel, and he recently teased that the project is “closer than ever.” He’s previously said that he’d like to develop Constantine 2 with an R-rating in mind. “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,” Lawrence said. “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. The idea is this time, at least for me, is to really go at it and make a real R-rated Constantine which is, I think, what people always wanted originally, not the PG-13 version that just happens to get an R.” I’ll admit that I’m intrigued by the idea of Reeves returning to play an older, wiser John Constantine, but will DC Studios really pull the trigger on this one? What do you think?
Constantine was recently released on 4K Ultra HD.
