‘Constantine’ Director Feels “More Hopeful” For Sequel Following James Gunn & Peter Safran’s DC Studios Exit

Francis Lawrence is feeling hopeful that Constantine 2 will finally be a reality now that James Gunn and Peter Safran have exited DC Studios.

In a new interview, the filmmaker says he has a script ready to go and would want to talk to the new leadership about moving forward with the project 20-years in the making.

“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,” Lawrence said in an interview with Collider.

He continued, “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.'”

In 2025, James Gunn addressed the sequel, saying on the BobaTalks podcast, “I’ve discussed it on and off. I’ve discussed it with Keanu [Reeves], but I have not read any script yet.”

Earlier that same year year, Reeves said he “pitched” a treatment for the Constantine sequel, telling Inverse, “We’ve [along with director Francis Lawrence] been trying to make this film for over a decade, and we just recently put a story together and pitched it to DC Studios and they said, ‘OK.’ So, we’re going to try and write a script.”

Constantine is loosely based on the DC Comics/Vertigo Comics’ Hellblazer. Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello wrote the script based on a story by Brodbin. Reeves gives life to John Constantine, a chain-smoking cynic with the ability to perceive the true visage of half-angels and half-demons.

In 2023, Lawrence revealed that the sequel had suffered some setbacks due to the writer’s strike, telling Gamespot, “And 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.”