Keanu Reeves has issued an update on Constantine 2, revealing plans to deliver a fresh draft of the script to DC Studios for — fans hope — approval.
John Constantine is an occult detective and exorcist who appears in DC Comics. Off the back of his success with The Matrix, Reeves played the character for the 2005 live action adaptation, which went on to become a cult hit. Over the 20 years since, fans have called for a sequel, with Reeves himself saying he’d love to make it happen.
While promoting his new movie, Good Fortune, the John Wick star told Fandango that a new draft of the Constantine 2 script had come in and he planned to take it to DC Studios, adding: “Hopefully they like it, too.”
“Yeah, fingers crossed,” Reeves said. “You know, another draft of the script came in. We’re waiting. We’re going to take it to the studio. Hopefully they like it, too.”
That’s a short and sweet tease for the on-again, off-again Constantine 2, but it sounds a lot more promising than the state of things suggested by Peter Stormare, who played Lucifer in the original and is set to reprise his role in the sequel, back in May.
“[There’s] a lot of back and forth, because… I think Keanu [Reeves] is not so happy with the scripts,” Stormare told The Direct. “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… 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.”
Stormare added that Reeves wasn’t interested in making the next installment an action-heavy project. “And I think Keanu says, ‘I’ve done ‘John Wick.’ This movie is spiritual,” he said. “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.”
In February, Reeves himself confirmed he’d had a pitch meeting at DC Studios. “We’ve 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, ‘Okay,’” Reeves told Inverse. “So, we’re going to try and write a script.”
It’s worth saying that there’s no guarantee this new Constantine 2 script will end up green lit by DC Studios co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran. Constantine 2 is not a confirmed project in the rebooted DCU, nor has it been mentioned by either Gunn or Safran as a possibility. So this one still feels on the edge.
Still, Reeves did tease that if it does get made, Constantine 2 will be set in “the same world” as the original film. “We’re not going off that,” he promised, before joking: “John Constantine’s going to be tortured even more.”
Reeves’ comments follow those from producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who said in September 2024 that Constantine 2 had a script but he was too scared to read it.
Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
