Keanu Reeves kind of has to give you faith. If you believe in something, want something enough, and are a good person , your dream will come true. Long wanting to play Wolverine, the actor co-created the comic book BRZRKR. “B” shares characteristics with Logan, but even better and more powerful. And of course, Reeves will get to play B on film and probably voice him in an anime.
So you bet on him. When he goes on talk shows and says the character he wants to revisit is John Constantine (pronounced with an “-EEN”), you know that eventually, even the mercurial David Zaslav at Warner Bros. Discovery is going to close his eyes in the face of the green light. Deadline reports that the 2005 Constantine has a sequel in active development, reuniting the original trio of Reeves, director Francis Lawrence, and co-producer Akiva Goldsman. This time around, Goldsman will write the script. The kicker may be that J.J. Abrams will be co-producing through his company Bad Robot, which had announced something with a version of John Constantine for HBO Max and now seems dead. Or maybe this was it all along. He does love his mystery boxes.
The first film made a decent amount of money, and definitely has fans. In the years since it’s release, I’ve come to appreciate it more though its original sin to me was transposing the character from British to American. It’s all a matter of pronunciation, as the British Matt Ryan has made his version of the character iconic to another set of fans. Hopefully, those fans overlap.
Created by Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Tottleben, the trenchcoated mystic first appeared in Swamp Thing #37. Resembling the lead singer of The Police, Constantine guided Swamp Thing through the supernatural backwaters of American legend before getting his own Vertigo book by Jamie Delano. DC has occasionally tried to soften him over the years, but his hard edge always grows back. Only DC’s Legends of Tomorrow lightened him up, as even his appearances in (most) animation had an R rating.
In Reeves’ first outing, as in comics, Constantine managed to trick Satan. Can he outwit Warner Bros. Discovery executives long enough to get this film made and released? Hell, yeah, he can. He’s Keanu Reeves.
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