It’s been 20 years since Keanu Reeves starred in Constantine, the DC/Vertigo adaptation from filmmaker Francis Lawrence. Now, about five years after serious rumors about a sequel started to percolate, DC Studios co-chief James Gunn says that he’s had conversations about the movie with Reeves, but still hasn’t read a script for the project.
The project is about as buzzy as you can get while not being actively in production; fans have clamored for the sequel for years, and Reeves — whose star power has only increased since 2005 — has been lobbying for it, too. It wasn’t long before Gunn took over DC that Warner Bros. said they were developing the movie.
“I’ve discussed it on and off. I’ve discussed it with Keanu,” Gunn said on the BobaTalks podcast. “But I have not read any script yet.”
That’s likely because the scripts aren’t quite “there” yet. Back in May, co-star Peter Stormare said that Reeves himself hasn’t been satisfied yet. Gunn, meanwhile, has always maintained that no DC Studios projects will go into production without a script he thinks is totally ready.
“[There’s] a lot of back and forth, because… I think Keanu [Reeves] is not so happy with the scripts,” actor Stormare told The Direct (via IGN). “Because the first one wasn’t that successful in the beginning, it became a sleeper and became a cult movie, and now it is one of the biggest cult movies ever… To do a sequel, the studios want to have, you know, cars flying in the air. They want to have people doing flip-flops and fighting action scenes. And I think Keanu says, ‘I’ve done John Wick. This movie is spiritual. It’s about demons and regular people. And I wanted to keep it that way.’ And we talked about that. I want to do God coming down exactly the same way, but in a black suit and looking more or less like Lucifer from the first one. I’m 12 years older, so it’s going to be hard to, you know, completely imitate the first movie. But, I think from Keanu, he wants to do a sequel that is very close to the first one.”
Back in 2023, Lawrence revealed in an interview that there were internal complications that slowed down development of the sequel, presumably alluding to the attempts by J.J. Abrams to put together a Justice League Dark project that would have included John Constantine and other supernatural DC characters.
The filmmaker told Gamespot, “…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.”
Constantine marked the first adaptation of the character to the screen, but in the 20 years since, he hasn’t spent very long away from it. In addition to a short-lived NBC series starring Matt Ryan, the character appeared in numerous animated projects (including two feature-length movies with his name in the title) and in the Arrowverse, appearing on Arrow, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and crossing over with Lucifer in Crisis on Infinite Earths.
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