‘Constantine’ Director Blames James Gunn for Keanu Reeves Sequel Delays

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Constantine director Francis Lawrence wants everyone to know that he shed not one tear when James Gunn and Peter Safran were fired from leading DC Studios earlier this week.

Lawrence, who has been working on a sequel to Constantine with Keanu Reeves, Akiva Goldsman, and J.J. Abrams since 2022 for Warner Bros., recently told Collider that the Gunn-era DC Studios prevented the movie from moving into production.

“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. 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.'”

Lawrence’s comments come just a week after it was reported that Francis Galluppi had been tapped to pen a new Constantine movie for DC Studios. That alone made it seem like Gunn and Safran had passed on Constantine 2 in favor of a reboot that could be part of the DC Universe. With that all in flux now, who knows what new DC Studios head Jeremy Latcham will want to do with the property.

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