Twenty years after the release of the DC Comics adaptation Constantine (watch it HERE), a sequel is finally moving ahead with director Francis Lawrence back at the helm and star Keanu Reeves reprising the role of occult expert John Constantine… but it’s moving ahead slowly, because it has already been a few years since this project was first announced. We heard that a script for Constantine 2 had been delivered to executive producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura around eight months ago, but now Constantine co-star Peter Stormare (who played Lucifer in the first film) has revealed that Reeves isn’t happy with the script.
Written by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello, the first Constantine had the following synopsis: As a suicide survivor, demon hunter John Constantine has literally been to hell and back — and he knows that when he dies, he’s got a one-way ticket to Satan’s realm unless he can earn enough goodwill to climb God’s stairway to heaven. While helping policewoman Angela Dodson investigate her identical twin’s apparent suicide, Constantine becomes caught up in a supernatural plot involving both demonic and angelic forces. Based on the DC/Vertigo “Hellblazer” comics. Reeves was joined in the cast by Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, Tilda Swinton, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Djimon Hounsou, Gavin Rossdale, and Peter Stormare.
Constantine producer Akiva Goldsman is writing Constantine 2 and is also producing the film with J.J. Abrams and Hannah Minghella. Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Erwin Stoff serve as executive producers.
Stormare told The Direct that Constantine 2 isn’t moving forward as quickly as hoped because “It’s a lot of back and forth… I think Keanu [Reeves], which I know pretty good, is not so happy with the scripts and usually what comes out of the studios… Because the first one wasn’t that successful in the beginning, it became a sleeper and became a cult movie, and now it is one of the biggest cult movies ever. But to do a sequel, the studios want to have, you know, cars flying in the air. They want to have people doing flip-flops and fighting action scenes. And I think Keanu says, ‘I’ve done John Wick. This movie is spiritual. It’s about demons and regular people. And I wanted to keep it that way.’ And we talked about that. I want to do God coming down exactly the same way, but in a black suit and looking more or less like Lucifer from the first one. I’m 12 years older, so it’s going to be hard to, you know, completely imitate the first movie. But, I think from Keanu, he wants to do a sequel that is very close to the first one. … I think he wants to do his character again, Constantine, as grounded as it was in the first one. It took a long time for you to become a cult movie, it really worked, and it will work on the audience again. You don’t have to add a lot of action and shootouts. … [Don’t turn it] into us flying around in harnesses all the time and shooting each other up. Don’t bring in the big guns. Let it be.“
What do you think of what Stormare had to say about the status of this project and the way Keanu Reeves is approaching it? Do you want to see Constantine 2 make it into production? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
