Back in September, Warner Bros. Discovery continued its track of roller coaster decisions by announcing that a Constantine sequel starring Keanu Reeves is finally in the works and with original director Francis Lawrence at the helm. It was a surprising move, not just because of the state of flux with WB Discovery’s DC Comics properties, but because a reboot from J.J. Abrams was in the works. (Obviously, that is no longer the case.)
As for what happened, in a nutshell, Keanu spoke. According to Lawrence, things started moving very quickly behind the scenes after Reeves answered a question from Stephen Colbert about which character he’d love to play again. When he said “John Constantine,” the crowd went wild and that got the ball rolling. Keanu literally breathed life into the project.
“People finally saw that and went, ‘Oh, wait, maybe you guys can go and make the Constantine sequel.’ So it was sort of a variety of factors,” Lawrence told Collider before elaborating on one of the other major roadblocks: Rights issues.
All the DC [properties], because Vertigo is part of DC, that sort of like the control of those properties got complicated with Warner Bros. with DC, with JJ [Abrams]’s deal, you know, all those kinds of things. There’s a lot of complicating factors. So it was never Akiva, and Keanu, and I [who had] to be sort of convinced to do it. It was really trying to figure out how we can get some sort of control over the Constantine character again.
The Constantine sequel does not have a release window at the time of this writing, and Reeves is currently busy balancing his other major franchise: The ever-expanding John Wick universe. However, he did find time for a new Matrix movie and, given his passion for playing John Constantine again, we’re guessing the project will happen sooner rather than later. Keanu is that powerful.
(Via Collider)
