The director of Keanu Reeve’s lone outing as Hellblazer’s John Constantine, 2005’s Constantine, says he’s talked to The Matrix actor about a sequel.
Francis Lawrence sat down for a conversation with SlashFilm where he revealed he approached Reeves and producer Akiva Goldsman about making another one, perhaps R-rated with a smaller budget.
Lawrence shared he wants to do it but there are obstacles. “I think we all wanted to do it. It was successful enough,” he said. “We wanted to make a responsible, more R-rated movie.”
He elaborated, “By responsible, I mean we’d make a movie that wouldn’t cost quite as much as the original, which we thought was going to be PG-13.”
Continuing, Lawrence said some work went into the sequel and he recognizes his film has a following.
“We worked on the sequel for a while. We have been talking about it recently,” he says. “It’s always stuck with all of us because we all love the movie, and especially realizing there’s a real cult following for this movie, it’d be fun to make.”
He added a sequel boils down to rights,”Unfortunately, I don’t even remember who has it, but with all these shared universes that exist now, with Constantine being a part of Vertigo, which is a part of DC, people have plans for these shared universes. You know, possibly different Constantines and things like that.”
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Lawrence concluded he can’t obtain the rights even with a game Keanu in tow, “Right now, we don’t have that character available to us for TV or movies, which is a bummer. We all investigated it, but I think it’s kind of crazy when you have Keanu, who would love to do another Constantine, and us wanting to do another Constantine, and people are like, ‘Uh, no, we got other plans.’ We’ll see what happens.”
Who has other plans for the cinematic and broadcast rights to John Constantine? That’d more than likely be JJ Abrams who is developing Justice League Dark and a rumored Constantine reboot with none other than Reeves.
Constantine was Francis Lawrence’s first feature film. He went on to direct I Am Legend, three Hungers Games movies, and Red Sparrow. Those last four all starred the unrelated X-Men: First Class star Jennifer Lawrence.
If he and Reeves, Abrams and rights aside, want to make a sequel, why not?