Released in 2005, “Constantine” was an interesting affair. On the one hand is lead Keanu Reeves bore little resemblance to the blond bisexual British bruiser character from the “Hellblazer” comics beyond some chain smoking and dark arts practices.
On the other it had a solid supporting cast, decent story, strong direction from a then little known Francis Lawrence, and it did pretty well – pulling in $230.9 million off an $100 million budget. Could we end up getting a sequel to it?
There has been talk of more John Constantine on the big screen, though it’s not clear in what form the project will take. Speaking with Slash Film, Lawrence expressed an interest in making a direct sequel and indicated he’s spoken to Warner Bros. Pictures about it. However they have other plans:
“I think we all wanted to do it [a sequel]. It was successful enough. We wanted to make a responsible, more R-rated movie. By responsible, I mean we’d make a movie that wouldn’t cost quite as much as the original, which we thought was going to be PG-13. We worked on the sequel for a while. It was tricky to come up with where to take it.
What I really liked about the first one was it was a really personal story, so I thought it’d be a mistake to get caught up in the supernatural gobblygook. The idea of a personal story was really interesting, and that was the hard thing to come across. We have been talking about it recently. It’s always stuck with all of us because we all love the movie, and especially realizing there’s a real cult following for this movie, it’d be fun to make. Keanu, Akiva, and I have actually talked about it.
Unfortunately, I don’t even remember who has it, but with all these shared universes that exist now, with Constantine being a part of Vertigo, which is a part of DC, people have plans for these shared universes. You know, possibly different Constantines and things like that.
Right now, we don’t have that character available to us for TV or movies, which is a bummer. We all investigated it, but I think it’s kind of crazy when you have Keanu, who would love to do another Constantine, and us wanting to do another Constantine, and people are like, ‘Uh, no, we got other plans.’ We’ll see what happens.”
The big-screen “Constantine” sequel never happened and so far in the fifteen years since the character hasn’t come to film. We have gotten a more comics accurate John Constantine in the form of Matt Ryan who has played him across multiple series and is currently a regular on “Legends of Tomorrow”. This month, Audible began releasing the audiobook version of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” with actor Taron Egerton playing the Constantine role.
A rumored “Justice League Dark” project has also long been in development with the character serving as that group’s leader of sorts. However there’s been little progress there.
