Stephen Colbert can add being a soothsayer to his long list of titles. Constantine 2 is now in production thanks to him. On a December 2021 of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he interviewed John Wick star Keanu Reeves, who was promoting the long-awaited continuation of the Matrix franchise: The Matrix Resurrections.
Similar to how Resurrections reintroduced audiences to Neo and 2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music brought back Bill Preston and Ted Logan to reform the Wyld Stallyns, Colbert probed if there were any other characters Reeves would like to revisit. On a whim, Reeves said he would love to play the magician-detective John Constantine again. The rest is history.
Keanu Shares Constantine 2 News With Colbert
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Three years and some change after his last appearance on The Late Show, Keanu Reeves returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater. This time, the Hollywood heavyweight stopped by primarily to discuss his new book, The Book of Elsewhere, which he co-wrote with Norwich-bred writer China Miéville. Topics soon shifted to Constantine 2, which, according to an article by Entertainment Weekly, will have the original director Francis Lawrence attached. Reeves was eager to thank Colbert for his hand in the sequel’s greenlight and gush on the meetings he was in soon after his last interview.
“The power of your show reached so many ears. I got ‘Colbert’d’ in the best way and it worked,” Reeves shared on The Late Show back in July. “The no started to become a maybe which became kind of a yes. It became maybe they will hire a writer, pay a writer, and right now-[I’m] waiting on a script. If it happens, you’re in!” Reeves’ last line was a tongue-in-cheek callback to Stephen’s joke comment on potentially playing a “reluctant demon” in the 2021 interview. In Stephen’s words, his character would be “a demon who perceives their evil is actually a virtue.” He goes on to state that “the sin for them might be flirting with goodness.”
Oscar-Winning Screenwriter Teases Updates
Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter for the John Forbes Nash biopic A Beautiful Mind, was tapped to write the script for the second installment. Goldsman is no stranger to the world of fantasy and science fiction as his previous credits are as the writer of I Am Legend and I, Robot and the writer-director of the supernatural romance film Winter’s Tale. During a producer’s roundtable event at San Diego Comic Con, Collider had the opportunity to talk with Goldsman on his work on the sequel.
While he wasn’t able to talk about the film’s potential rating or any plot details, he did reveal versions of the story that were being workshopped. “It’s good. I hope to have a script for my partners soon,” Akiva stated. “There was always this desire, if not lurching, to try to redo it. We tried it for TV, and we could never quite get the rights back; the rights were sort of going around. There was a sort of ground swell—there was a TV series somewhere in there.”
Constantine Director Credits Colbert + John Constantine in Other Media
In an interview with Collider a year prior, director and Hunger Games filmmaker Francis Lawrence also credits the 2021 Colbert interview for creating sort of a resurgence of interest in a Constantine continuation. “I believe it was Keanu’s appearance on Colbert and the crowd went nuts,” Lawrence stated during an interview about his movie Slumberland. “People finally saw that and went ‘Oh wait, maybe you guys can go and make the Constantine sequel.'”
While they lacked rights to the Hellblazer comics that the movies are based on to make one, it would not be John Constantine’s first time on a television show. Welsh actor Matt Ryan played a more faithful adaptation of John on a short-lived NBC series. Ryan would go on to portray the Hellblazer many more times in DC animated films such as Justice League Dark: Apokolips War and the CW’s Arrowverse shows Arrow, Batwoman, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow.
Final Thoughts
Constantine 2 has all the signs of a good time at the theater. Francis Lawrence’s filmmaking career began with directing the first film; his visual flair blended perfectly with the source material. The fact that both Lawrence and Reeves have had time to perfect their respective crafts over the last two decades has me sold and up for anything. Will they introduce a multiverse and a team-up with both Matt’s John and Keanu’s John? The possibilities are endless. I have faith.
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