It has been 12 years since DC released a TV show that was hailed as a perfect adaptation, and it made up for a movie that dropped the ball the previous decade. In 2014, DC released a new series on NBC that followed one of its greatest supernatural characters, Constantine. This show came nine years after a movie was released based on the same character, but one that was criticized by fans and ended up as a disappointment when released, only to become a cult classic over time. The biggest complaints about the Constantine movie were that Keanu Reeves played the supernatural detective, and it was nothing like the comics.
Those complaints were fixed with the TV show that premiered on October 24, 2014. With Matt Ryan in the role of John Constantine, it looked like he stepped right out of the comics and onto the small screen. While the series wasn’t a huge success and was cancelled after just one season, this version of Constantine didn’t die and ended up joining the Arrowverse after the fact.
While the Constantine movie has become a cult classic thanks to reappraisals over time, fans were not happy with it when the movie hit theaters in 2005. The movie is really good and is pretty faithful to the source material, but the biggest problem everyone had was Keanu Reeves as John Constantine. The laid-back coolness of Reeves stood in stark contrast to the dark, brooding John Constantine from the comics, and he just didn’t fit the role at all. While he has since been accepted, thanks in part to John Wick giving him a darker edge, at the time, he wasn’t right for the role.
Constantine was a character who made his debut in Swamp Thing comics for DC in 1985. He soon got his own series titled Hellblazer, and it was one of the critically acclaimed releases by Vertigo Comics, an imprint for DC at the time. He was not what DC was promoting at the time: a chain-smoking con man who worked as an occult detective. He was someone Heaven didn’t want and who eventually made a deal that ensured Hell couldn’t take him in either. In the 1980s, with the Satanic panic, he was very controversial, and that made him very popular. Eventually, he made his way into DC Comics years later and then to the movies and TV.
It wasn’t until Constantine arrived on NBC in 2014 that he was portrayed the way fans had hoped. Matt Ryan was perfectly cast, and he not only looked just like Constantine from the comics, but he had the same swagger and arrogance as the comic book character. The show had him playing the same role, working as a demon hunter who practices the occult while seeking redemption for his past. The one big change was bringing him to the United States to locate and battle demons, but that helped him when his show was cancelled after just one season. That is when he ended up joining the Arrowverse continuity, and specifically the series Legends of Tomorrow.
The first season of Constantine ended early. NBC had ordered 13 episodes, and there was a chance for more, but then the network chose to stop at 13 and then decided not to order a second season either. According to the network, the show didn’t do as well as it had hoped, and there was a delay in viewership. This meant that it wasn’t something they would continue to put money into. This was all despite the series getting good reviews. Those reviews, along with Matt Ryan’s willingness to stick around, meant the character would survive.
In 2015, Ryan appeared on Arrow as John Constantine in the episode “Haunted,” and the producers said this was the same version of Constantine that appeared on the NBC series. This retroactively put the two characters in the same overall universe. This led to 2017, when Constantine showed up on Legends of Tomorrow, which ended up as his new home in the Arrowverse. After guest appearances on Season 3, Ryan ended up as a main character for the next three seasons before finally leaving the show in Season 7. This also led Ryan to voice John Constantine in the DC Animated Movie Universe for the Justice League Dark movies.
What are your thoughts on Matt Ryan’s run as John Constantine? Let us know your favorite Constantine moments in the comments below.
