Keanu Reeves sounds unhappy with studio interference on Constantine 2

Earlier this year, Keanu Reeves teased that he and Francis Lawrence had pitched a story for a Constantine sequel and gotten the go-ahead from DC Studios to develop a script. Unfortunately, his co-star Peter Stormare suggests the writing phase may not be going so well. In an interview with The Direct, Stormare hinted at “a lot of back and forth” with the studio and that Reeves “is not so happy with the scripts” at the moment.

Stormare pointed out that 2005’s Constantine “is one of the biggest cult movies ever,” so you might think that the creative team would get free rein to recreate the old magic. (Of course, not everyone was a fan.) Instead, “to do a sequel, the studios want to have, you know, cars flying in the air. They want to have people doing flip-flops and fighting action scenes,” Stormare lamented. “And I think Keanu says, ‘I’ve done John Wick. This movie is spiritual. It’s about demons and regular people. And I wanted to keep it that way.'”

Stormare observed that Reeves “wants to do a sequel that is very close to the first one” (in a similar manner to how Godfather 2 built on the original, is the actor’s example). Reeves is “very proud” of what they accomplished the first time around: “He was fighting for it to be a character that he loved and wanted to develop,” Stormare explained. That’s apparently still the case with the sequel, where Reeves is resistant to turning it into too much of an action movie rather than “going deeper and deeper into the characters.”

“I think he wants to do his character again, Constantine, as grounded as it was in the first one,” Stormare said. “It took a long time for you to become a cult movie, it really worked, and it will work on the audience again. You don’t have to add a lot of action and shootouts. You have other movies. Don’t turn it into big Marvel… [Don’t turn it] into us flying around in harnesses all the time and shooting each other up. Don’t bring in the big guns. Let it be.”