Constantine 2 Director Is More "Hopeful" With The Regime Change
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Constantine 2 Director Is More "Hopeful" With The Regime Change
Director Francis Lawrence thinks the new regime shift at DC Studios has made him more hopeful that Constantine 2 might actually come to be.
Published Wed, 11 Nov 2026 18:46:10 -0600
by Kaitlyn Booth
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Article Summary
- Constantine 2 director Francis Lawrence says the DC Studios regime change makes him more hopeful the sequel can happen.
- Lawrence reveals Constantine 2 has faced studio roadblocks for years, even with Keanu Reeves and key creatives eager to return.
- He suggests the previous DC leadership may not have embraced this Constantine 2 vision while building a broader universe.
- Lawrence says Constantine 2 would need a scrappy budget.
The DC Studios regime change is going to throw many projects into varying states of limbo. We see it every time there is a shift like ths and movies and shows fall into the cracks. Some of them are released, some of them are quietly canceled, and we never talk about them again. It really depends on how high profile the project is. However, a project like the long-awaited sequel to 2005's Constantine might be the rare exception where the regime might help get a movie out of limbo instead of throwing it back in. We haven't heard much about the film recently; it's been a while since we heard anything definitive. However, Lawrence spoke to Collider, and while he wasn't happy about James Gunn and Peter Safran losing their jobs, for Constantine 2, the regime change is making him more hopeful that the film will come to fruition, not less.
"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.'"
Gunn and Safran were attempting to establish their own universe of characters, so working on a legacy sequel like Constantine 2 might not have fit into their plans. The news that another Constantine film was in the works mere days before the DC Studios news broke seemed to indicate that Gunn and Safran were interested in the character, but maybe not the version that Lawrence and star Keanu Reeves created. It's not even a bad conclusion to draw that the public might not be as interested; while the film did well at the box office, its legacy went from maligning how much it diverged from the source material to enjoying it as a cult classic.
As for what Lawrence could do to try and make the film happen, he acknowledged that budget and salaries, specifically for someone like Reeves who is a bigger and more expensive star than he was in even 2005, are something that they will really have to keep in mind when making this film. Lawrence explained, "We have to be responsible. We want to make it. This is not the kind of movie that I would charge full freight, and Keanu could charge full freight. It's something we have to do because we love and want to take a gamble on it, and do it responsibly. And so we've been thinking about that same idea for 20 years, that we're not going to do it for $100 million. We have to be scrappy about it."
Constantine 2 leaning into the horror and supernatural elements with a smaller budget makes sense; if there was ever a genre that can be done quick, cheap and dirty it's horror. It's interesting that Lawrence cited $100 million there, since the reported budget of the 2005 film is $70-$100 million. Inflation does put 2005 $100M at just under $171M in 2026 money.
Constantine 2 Has Been A Long Time Coming
Constantine was released in 2005, seventeen years ago, and was part of the second wave of comic book movies that became mainstream, helping make the genre as dominant as it is today. While X-Men, Spider-Man, and Blade were the 1-2-3 punch that kicked things off, it was things like Hellboy in 2004, Constantine and Batman Begins in 2005, and X-2 in 2003 that really cemented that foundation. Hellboy and Constantine, doing well, proved there was an audience beyond superheroes, much as Blade did in 1998. Constantine brought in $230 million worldwide on a $70-$100 million budget, which is pretty damn solid, and it has garnered an extremely loyal cult following over the years.
People have been begging for a sequel for years, and it has long been rumored that one is in the works. In September 2022, after over a month of pure chaos at Warner Bros. Discovery, they finally announced that a sequel was in the works. In November 2022, following the shake-ups at DC Studios, Francis Lawrence confirmed he was still working on the project. After the release of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes a year later, in November 2023, he confirmed that Constantine 2 is his focus going forward. However, that was announced before another Hunger Games movie, Sunrise on the Reaping. News about the film had largely stalled over the last few years until the Paramount merger and the leadership changes at DC Studios.
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