Few sequels have spent as long in limbo as the follow-up to Constantine, the Keanu Reeves occult thriller that shrugged off middling reviews to become a cult favorite. Its director, Francis Lawrence, is now pinning much of that delay on the people who ran DC Studios, and with James Gunn and Peter Safran stepping down, he sees an opening the project has not had in years.

Speaking to Collider while promoting The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Lawrence was careful to say he takes no pleasure in anyone losing a job. “This is not like a schadenfreude kind of thing,” he said, before explaining that his team has “an idea” and “a script,” and that “the people that were at DC were an impediment to us making it.” Deadline amplified the interview as a director who now feels “more hopeful” about the sequel under new leadership.

The exit itself landed as a shock. Paramount Skydance used its quarterly earnings call to announce that Gunn and Safran would step down as co-heads of DC Studios, with former Marvel production executive Jeremy Latcham taking over as president and chief creative officer. The shake-up follows Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros., and it leaves every inherited or in-development DC project waiting on a new decision-maker. Lawrence was blunt about where the call now sits: with “people at Paramount, Warner, whoever’s running DC now.”

The creative team has been in place for years. Akiva Goldsman is writing the sequel and J.J. Abrams is producing alongside Reeves, and Lawrence insisted the hold-up never came from their side: “It’s not me, it’s not Keanu, it’s not Akiva.” Reeves himself said in early October that another draft of the script had come in and that the team planned to take it to the studio.

There is a complication. Days before the shake-up, DC Studios hired Francis Galluppi, the filmmaker behind The Last Stop in Yuma County, to write a separate John Constantine film that is still in very early development. Lawrence says a second version of the character does not bother him. “If they just let us do the sequel to our version, they can coexist,” he said, adding that he has “renewed hope” of forward movement.

The numbers behind that hope are not small. The original Constantine opened in February 2005 and grossed more than $230 million worldwide on a reported budget of about $100 million. The sequel was announced in 2022, shortly before Gunn and Safran took charge of DC, and no production start has been set. Lawrence’s Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters later this month, and Latcham formally takes over at DC on December 1.

That leaves the fate of Reeves’s trench coat resting, at least in part, with an executive who has not yet clocked in at DC.