“Constantine” star Keanu Reeves, director Francis Lawrence, and producer Akiva Goldsman have all reunited to reflect on the 2005 DC Comics film adaptation as part of this year’s Comic-Con @ Home celebration.
The hour-long discussion covered numerous topics, with one being a possible sequel. Goldsman says there was an express desire to do a follow-up: “Boy, we wanted to make a sequel, We wanted to make a hard R sequel; we’d probably make it tomorrow.” One story idea they had on hand would’ve seen John meeting Jesus.
Another topic was the film’s rating. The movie scored an R despite not containing any real gore, nudity or language – the kind of things that usually generate said ratings. Lawrence says the production deliberately set out to make the movie a PG-13 from the very beginning and explained they were surprised to learn they landed an R and the MPAA’s reasoning for it:
“Warners… dictated that it had to be PG-13 because of what it cost. And we actually got this sort of list of guidelines of what you can do and what you can’t do in a PG-13 movie. And we followed those rules to a T. The amount of times you can say ‘f–k’, the kinds of nudity, the blood, the violence, all of those things.
And we screened it for the MPAA, and I remember hearing that they got about five minutes in and put their notepads down and said that we got a hard R for ‘tone’. And so this is not something that’s on the list. I think it was ‘an overwhelming sense of dread’ was what I heard that they had from the opening scene onward. And they didn’t think there was anything that we could do about it.
Basically what we had was a PG-13 movie that got an R rating. Which just killed me, because it’s like if we were gonna get an R rating, I would’ve made an R-rated movie. We could’ve really gone for it in terms of intensity and violence and language and all those kinds of things. We got a bit screwed on that front. And we did try to fight, but we obviously didn’t win that battle.”
Goldsman chimed in saying a subset of religious horror seems to score R ratings much more quickly, especially anything portraying demons. He adds the studios always found the film: “a little bit of a feathered fish; its oddness. Warner Bros. didn’t care that much about the movie at the time when we were making it. It all changed when they saw the first cut.”
The film went on to gross $230.9 million off an $100 million budget and did well in home video sales. You can watch the full panel with Reeves, Lawrence and Goldsman below.
