Keanu Reeves has been trying to get a Constantine sequel going for years, but thanks to the recent shake-up at DC Studios, there’s “renewed hope” that the project might actually happen. At least, that’s what Constantine director Francis Lawrence believes.
Although it seemed like they were going to be sticking around, James Gunn and Peter Safran officially stepped down as the heads of DC Studios earlier this week, with former Marvel SVP of Production and Development Jeremy Latcham stepping in to replace them.
Lawrence told Collider that this new regime may be more receptive to making a sequel to a movie released over twenty years ago.
“Well, I’ll tell you this. Not that I want anybody to lose their jobs, so this is not like a schadenfreude kind of thing, but I will say that we’ve been trying to make Constantine 2 for 20-something years, and we have an idea, and we have a script, and we’ve been wanting to make it, and the people that were at DC were an impediment to us making it,” Lawrence said. “So, we are now more hopeful as of yesterday’s news that maybe now there will be another opportunity. But again, we’ve been trying to make this for 20-something years, and there’s always been obstacles in the road to making it, and it’s not me, it’s not Keanu, it’s not Akiva. J.J. [Abrams] is on it, as well. We all want to do it. So, it’s really going to be people at Paramount, Warner, whoever’s running DC now, getting everybody on board to say, like, ‘Hey, we can do a sequel of our version of Constantine.’“
Lawrence added that even if DC has plans for another version of Constantine, their sequel can still happen. “I have renewed hope as of yesterday that there might be some possibility for forward movement there.“
It was announced last week, just days before Gunn and Safran got the boot, that DC Studios were in the very early stages of developing a John Constantine movie and had tapped Francis Galluppi (Evil Dead Wrath) to write the script.
Would you prefer a fresh take on Constantine, or would you prefer Keanu Reeves to return for the long-belated sequel? Or both?