'Constantine 2' eyes return after James Gunn exits DC, director cites studio was an 'impediment'
The director of the Keanu Reeves-starrer Constantine has found "renewed hope" in his film's sequel after the exit of DC Studio heads James Gunn and Peter Safran.
In an interview with Collider on Nov. 11, Constantine director Francis Lawrence said he is now more optimistic about the sequel moving forward after roughly two decades of attempts.
"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," Lawrence said.
With news of Gunn and Safran's DC departure, Lawrence said he is "now more hopeful...that maybe now there will be another opportunity."
According to him, the main players of the first film are eager for the sequel, including Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams.
"We all want to do it," Lawrence said.
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Control now lies with the "people at Paramount, Warner, whoever's running DC now," he added, saying they have the prerogative of "getting everybody on board to say, like, 'Hey, we can do a sequel of our version of Constantine.'"
While acknowledging that DC might prefer a different John Constantine for the sequel to fit the studio's shared universe, Lawrence said any version of Reeves' role is okay with him as long as the sequel happens.
"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," he said. "If they just let us do the sequel to our version, they can coexist."
One thing Lawrence is adamant about for the possible sequel is its R rating. According to the director, he made the first film to be PG-13, but it was slapped with an R rating instead. Although he said he tried to have the rating revised down to PG, the R rating stayed.
It inadvertently dictated the direction of the sequel.
"We all kind of came back and said, 'Okay, when we do this next time, we're making the hard R version of Constantine.' So when we do it, it's going to be the hard-R version of Constantine," Lawrence said.
Constantine tells the supernatural horror story of John Constantine, a cynical freelance demon hunter who sees half-angels and half-demons in their true forms on Earth.
