Francis Lawrence Says Constantine 2 Is Still On: "We Have Control"

It's been nearly two decades since the first Constantine movie--starring Keanu Reeves as the noir-ish spiritual warrior--became an instant cult classic and launched the film career of director Francis Lawrence. Lawrence is now a big name in Hollywood, and his Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is hitting theaters in November. But his desire to make a sequel to his first movie hasn't faded over time, and apparently a second Constantine movie is still very much in play.

But Constantine is a DC Comics property, under the genre-focused Vertigo label, and everything involving DC on the big screen is in a weird place right now as James Gunn and Peter Safran rework the franchise. While it's seemed as if Constantine 2 had been picking up momentum in recent years, the constantly evolving situation at DC has continued to cast doubt on its prospects. And the existence of a pretty different TV version of John Constantine, played by Matt Ryan both on his own show and across the Arrowverse, didn't seem to help the movie's prospects much.

But we never stopped hoping for that sequel, and when we spoke to Lawrence during the press tour for his Hunger Games prequel, we couldn't resist squeezing in a question about it. And we got a pretty optimistic answer.

"So Constantine 2 got obviously held up by the writers strike," Lawrence told me. "And we had to jump through a bunch of hurdles to get control of the character again, because other people had control of the Vertigo stuff. We have control. Keanu and Akiva Goldsman and I have been in meetings and have been hashing out what we think the story is going to be, and there's more meetings of those that have to happen--the script has to be written--but really hoping that we get to do Constantine 2, and make a real rated R version of it."

That's not exactly an absolute guarantee or anything like that, but it sounds like we're closer to a Constantine sequel than we've been in many years, if not ever. And that's reason to believe.

Unlike most of the biggest names in comics, Constantine's adventures primarily revolve around Catholicism--he deals with stuff from Christian lore, such as demons and angels, and he does it in the style of a old-timey detective in a noir thriller. And with Reeves, in 2005, that first movie certainly had the feel of The Matrix With Religious Stuff. There's multiple layers of novelty there--it's not hard to figure out the appeal of this character and these stories in the context of our heavily religious culture.

In addition to Reeves, the first movie starred Rachel Weisz, Shia LeBeouf, Djimon Hounsou, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare, and Gavin Rossdale.

For those who have been very patiently (or impatiently) waiting for Constantine 2 for 18 years: the end may actually be in sight.