Filmmaker Francis Lawrence says he is ‘more hopeful’ that a sequel to 2005’s “Constantine” will happen under the new management at DC Studios and Warner Bros. Pictures.
With James Gunn and Peter Safran exiting DC, what projects the studio will work on next is unclear at this point. One film that’s been in development since 2022 is “Constantine 2” with Lawrence set to direct, Akiva Goldsman writing the script and J.J. Abrams producing.
Lawrence directed “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping” which is set to open next week in cinemas and is looking at a $120+ million opening weekend. Lawrence has several projects he could potentially move to next, one being the long-awaited “BioShock” film.
Another is the “Constantine” sequel, but neither Gunn or Safran seemed in a rush to move forward with it. According to Lawrence, that may likely change as he tells Collider:
“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.
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 also touched upon the possibility that DC might want a different John Constantine for its shared universe, tying back to the news a week ago that filmmaker Francis Galluppi was writing a script for a new take on the character, though that version is in “very early development”.
Lawrence says that wouldn’t stop him from wanting to make the Reeves-led sequel:
“Personally, I don’t even care if somebody has a plan for some sort of shared universe, and they want to do another version of Constantine. If they just let us do the sequel to our version, they can coexist. So, I have renewed hope as of yesterday that there might be some possibility for forward movement there.”
The previous film was made with a PG-13 in mind but was stuck with an R rating, the follow-up is expected to be a ‘hard R’ from the get go. Whether Skydance and new DC Studios chief Jeremy Latcham will approve such a project, we’ll see.
