Trailer not playing? Watch the 2005 Constantine trailer on YouTube.
John Constantine, the trench-coated occult con man who has been cadging cigarettes off the DC Universe since 1985, is getting another film. Deadline reports, as an exclusive, that DC Studios has hired Francis Galluppi to write a new John Constantine movie. It’s very early days: no director, no cast, nobody else attached, and DC declined to comment. In Hollywood terms it’s less a film than a man in a room with a laptop and an overflowing ashtray.
Galluppi wrote and directed The Last Stop in Yuma County, a tight little desert thriller about a knife salesman stranded at a rural rest stop when a pair of bank robbers pull in (trailer here). It premiered to warm notices at Fantastic Fest and impressed Sam Raimi enough that Galluppi was handed the next Evil Dead film, Evil Dead Wrath, which Warner Bros has dated for 7 April 2028. Raimi once praised him for knowing when to keep an audience waiting “in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence”. Which, come to think of it, is also a fair description of an average Tuesday for John Constantine.
The hire comes while Clayface is still oozing through cinemas, having gone past $90 million worldwide, and that seems to have persuaded DC Studios that a horror picture built around a second-string name is a perfectly respectable thing to make. Constantine is the obvious next step. He’s a horror character first and a superhero never, a man whose idea of a superpower is knowing which demon owes him a favour.
He first turned up in The Saga of the Swamp Thing #37 in 1985, created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben, reputedly because the artists fancied drawing someone who looked like Sting. He then ran for 300 issues of Hellblazer as a working-class Liverpudlian magician with a grift for every occasion, a Silk Cut for every crisis and a casualty list of friends that would make a Doctor Who companion think twice about signing up.
On screen he has had a mixed time of it. Francis Lawrence’s 2005 Constantine (trailer above) turned him into a dark-haired American in Los Angeles played by Keanu Reeves, which annoyed the purists at the time and has since earned the film a second life as a cult favourite. Matt Ryan got the hair and the accent right in NBC’s Constantine in 2014, which managed one season before he was carried off to Legends of Tomorrow, the television equivalent of being rescued by a passing time-ship.
Which leaves the matter of Keanu. Reeves said in 2025 that DC Studios had approved a story pitch for Constantine 2, with Lawrence and writer Akiva Goldsman aiming to bring it in as an Elseworlds title set in the same world as the 2005 film. Deadline’s report doesn’t mention that project at all, so nobody yet knows whether the two are rivals, relatives, or one quietly replacing the other. Two Constantines in development at once would at least be on brand for a character who has spent four decades with more than one party queuing for his soul.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’d settle for one thing from whichever version reaches the multiplex first: a John Constantine who is unmistakably British, says something unforgivable at a funeral, and ends the film rather worse off than he started it. Galluppi’s calling card was a handful of desperate people trapped in a roadside diner. Constantine has never been anything else.
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