Following the sudden news that James Gunn and Peter Safran were ousted from their roles as co-heads of DC Studios following the Warner Bros./Paramount merger, Francis Lawrence, director of the 2005 movie Constantine, has come forward to explain that this leadership shakeup gives him renewed hope for a sequel.
Speaking to Collider, Lawrence said that he was optimistic that he might finally get a chance to make Constantine 2, suggesting that the people who had been running DC might have been preventing his sequel from seeing the light of day.
“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,” he explained when asked if the movie was now more likely to happen after the change in DC leadership.
“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.'”
The original film starred Keanu Reeves as the titular character and was loosely based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer, which centred on supernatural detective John Constantine on a mission to rid the world of evil supernatural entities. The film became a cult hit, and a sequel was announced in 2022, with Lawrence returning to direct and Akiva Goldsman attached to write the screenplay. While little news on its progress has surfaced over the years that followed, Lawrence previously said in a 2025 interview that the sequel was “closer than ever”, with Reaves also set to reprise his role.
Additionally, Lawrence stated that he didn’t mind if Constantine gets pulled into a shared universe instead of existing as a standalone sequel, and that he and Reeves would be “responsible” about the film’s budget as long as it gets made, although he was adamant about making a true R-rated experience, explaining that they had previously shot the original film for PG-13 standards, only for it to be hit with an R rating, so they want to make a “hard-R version of Constantine” from the get-go this time around.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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