It’s only been a year since Constantine 2 was announced—practically no time at all in Hollywood. But things out of even John Constantine’s control have held up the sequel, including the writers’ strike and the kind of rights issues that often crop up where characters owned by corporations are involved. But the movie, says director Francis Lawrence, is coming: “We have control.”
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Lawrence said this in an interview with Gamespot; the director is currently promoting his latest Hunger Games film, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. But the people (me, I’m talking about me) want to know about Constantine, and he gave a tantalizing update:
“So Constantine 2 got obviously held up by the writers strike … 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 [Reeves] 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.”
Constantine is, of course, the story of a man who can spends a lot of time sending nasty demons back to hell, which is generally an R-rated occupation. The first movie was also rated R, but was intended to be PG-13. Lawrence has been taking about making the sequel a truly R-rated film for at least a year; in 2022 he told The Wrap, “My big, big regret was that we have an R-rated movie that’s really a PG-13 movie. … And if I was going to have to go have an R, I would have really made an R-rated movie. I would have made it much scarier and much more violent and I would have really made an R-rated movie.”
Someday, John Constantine will be on the job again, and it’ll be scary as hell.
