Keanu Reeves is a treasure and one of his most iconic roles was as John Constantine in 2005’s Constantine. While this was back in the day when comic book movies didn’t automatically spawn multi-film franchises. But, that doesn’t mean that ideas for a sequel weren’t thought of. In fact, Reeves, director Francis Lawrence, and producer Akiva Goldsman revealed during a Collider panel at Comic-Con@Home that there were plenty of sequel ideas.
Goldsman revealed it was the studio that prevented them from having a sequel:
“Yes. Oh my God, yes. [Sequels] endlessly came up. Boy, we wanted to, we wanted to do a hard-R sequel. I think we’d probably make it tomorrow. We tried a lot of different ways…to the studios who make it, which was Village Roadshow and Warner Bros., it was always sort of a feathered fish. Its oddness, the thing that you’re talking about, which I do think is one of the most lovely parts of the film, the way it is equally comfortable in a character scene between Keanu and Rachel [Weisz] as it is with demons hurling themselves at a man who is going to light his fist on fire and expel them. It’s odd. It’s not really action-packed, it just has a bunch of action. This movie isn’t really a thing, it’s a few things. Which is what I think is beautiful about it. But those seem to get harder and harder to make, and even then…we talked about it, we had ideas.”
Goldsman continued
“I love that one of [John] wakes up in a cell, he has to identify a prisoner. Remember? It was [screenwriter Frank Cabello’s] idea. [The prisoner] was Jesus. He comes up and he’s in New York. Just…yeah we talked about a few scenes.”
Lawrence also added:
“We definitely talked about sequels more than the studio. Because the movie did fairly well, and this was also a time when people still sold DVDs so I think it did decently at the time. But it wasn’t a knockout success and it also wasn’t really critically acclaimed by any means at the time. The cool thing for me about the movie is just, in the 15 years since it released, every time I do a movie and travel the world and do junkets, I am signing Constantine DVDs. More than any other movie that I’ve done. Over the years, different countries, people really, really love this movie. It’s like found a new life in a weird way. I even see articles, like Rotten Tomatoes posted an article like apologizing to Constantine about the Rotten Tomato count it had. People have sort of discovered it recently, weirdly. It’s always had its cult fanbase, which is great. But I think people have discovered it in a new way. So I think we always loved it more than the studios did.”
Would you want a Constantine sequel starring Reeves?
Source: Collider
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