Francis Lawrence told Collider, in an interview published Nov. 11, that the team has been trying to make Constantine 2 “for 20-something years” and that “the people that were at DC were an impediment to us making it.” It matters because Lawrence is naming the obstacle out loud two days after that obstacle lost the job.
The obstacle is James Gunn and Peter Safran, who Skydance removed as co-chairmen and co-CEOs of DC Studios on Nov. 9, replacing them with Marvel veteran Jeremy Latcham as president and chief creative officer. David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz delivered the news in person, walking into Gunn and Safran’s offices on the Warner Bros. lot on Friday, Nov. 6, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the shakeup, which Movie Opinions covered in its own report on the DC leadership change. Lawrence’s tone the following Wednesday was careful rather than triumphant: “So, we are now more hopeful as of yesterday’s news that maybe now there will be another opportunity.”
He spread the blame away from the creative team before anyone could ask. “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,” he said, framing the ask as a meeting rather than a greenlight: “It’s really going to be people at Paramount, Warner, whoever’s running DC now, getting everybody on board.”
The original film is the case for why anyone bothers. Constantine opened to $29.8 million domestic over the Feb. 18-20, 2005 weekend and closed at $75,976,178 in North America and $230,912,116 worldwide on a reported $100 million budget, per Box Office Mojo. Two thirds of that gross, 67.1 percent, came from outside North America, which is the same foreign-heavy math a Reeves sequel would lean on now that John Wick has made him a bigger export than he was in 2005.
The paper trail since then has run in circles. Warner Bros. put the sequel into development in September 2022 with Lawrence directing and Akiva Goldsman writing. Reeves told Inverse in February 2025 that DC had said “Okay” to a pitched story. Gunn’s version of that same year, on the BobaTalks podcast, was that he had discussed it with Reeves but “not read any script yet.” Reeves said another draft arrived by October 2025. Twenty months of development have produced at least two drafts and zero greenlights (a pace that would embarrass a DMV).
What this probably means: Lawrence is not the only Constantine pitch sitting in Latcham’s inbox. Six days before the shakeup, on Nov. 4, DC hired Evil Dead Rise filmmaker Francis Galluppi to write a separate John Constantine movie, in very early development with no cast attached. Lawrence has already made his peace with sharing the character: “If they just let us do the sequel to our version, they can coexist.” A new boss weighing a fresh, cheap script against a decade-old draft attached to an aging A-lister has an easy argument for picking neither, or for making Lawrence wait through a slate review before saying yes to either.
Latcham reports to Skydance Motion Picture Group co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein and takes the DC chair on Dec. 1. That is the first date on which anyone with the authority to greenlight Constantine 2 is actually sitting in the room.
