It’s been nearly two decades since the first Constantine movie–starring Keanu Reeves as the noir-ish spiritual warrior–became an instant cult classic and launched the film career of director Francis Lawrence. Lawrence is now a big name in Hollywood, and his Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is hitting theaters in November. But his desire to make a sequel to his first movie hasn’t faded over time, and apparently a second Constantine movie is still very much in play.
But Constantine is a DC Comics property, under the genre-focused Vertigo label, and everything involving DC on the big screen is in a weird place right now as James Gunn and Peter Safran rework the franchise. While it’s seemed as if Constantine 2 had been picking up momentum in recent years, the constantly evolving situation at DC has continued to cast doubt on its prospects. And the existence of a pretty different TV version of John Constantine, played by Matt Ryan both on his own show and across the Arrowverse, didn’t seem to help the movie’s prospects much.
But we never stopped hoping for that sequel, and when we spoke to Lawrence during the press tour for his Hunger Games prequel, we couldn’t resist squeezing in a question about it. And we got a pretty optimistic answer.