Three years before the release of The Dark Knight and the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Keanu Reeves teamed up with first time director Francis Lawrence for a comic book movie unlike anything we’d seen before. Constantine, based on the fan-favorite Hellblazer comics, brought the war between heaven and hell to the big screen, creating a world that audiences would crave for years to come. Now, two decades after Constantine helped change the game, the film is getting a much-deserved 4K release.
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On behalf of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, ComicBook can exclusively announce that the highly anticipated Constantine 4K will be released on February 18th. That day will see a standard 4K UHD physical release, a limited edition 4K steelbook release, and a digital 4K version of the film. You can preorder your copy of the limited edition steelbook here.
If you didn’t know, February 18, 2025 is actually the 20th anniversary of Constantine‘s original theatrical release, making for a perfect date for the 4K release. The new restoration of Constantine was sourced from the original camera negative and overseen by director Francis Lawrence.
Additionally, Lawrence and Keanu Reeves reunited for a new special feature, looking back on how Constantine has grown in popularity and evolved over the last 20 years. You can check out an exclusive first look at that feature in the video at the top of the page.
Here’s the full list of special features included on the Constantine 4K disc:
- New Feature – Two Decades of Damnation
- Commentaries
- Channeling Constantine
- Conjuring Constantine
- Holy Relics
- Shotgun Shootout
- Hellscape
- Warrior Wings
- Unholy Abduction
- Demon Face
- Foresight” The Power of Pre-Visualization
- A Writer’s Vision
- Director’s Confessional
To celebrate both the release of the Constantine 4K and the film’s 20th anniversary, ComicBook spoke with Francis Lawrence about his relationship to the movie over these last two decades.
“It’s interesting because I never really thought of it as a comic book movie,” Lawrence told us. “That’s nothing negative or positive about comic book movies in general. It was really just that I was not a huge comic book person. I didn’t really have much knowledge of John Constantine and Hellblazer before reading the script. So the script was brought to me and it was my first dive into the world of Constantine. So I really just thought of him as a character that I really loved, and I thought of it as a world I would enjoy building.”
“You’d never seen John Constantine before. You had never seen that kind of contemporary noir with a character like this that borderlines this supernatural world,” he continued. “So it felt unique. And it just felt like there’s a lot of opportunity for the kinds of characters that I really like. I’m really drawn to very lonely figures and Constantine is certainly one of those. And it’s just a lot of fun, to create that world. So I think that, quite honestly, it just felt really unique and felt like a great opportunity, especially as a first film.”
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When it came time to work on this 20th anniversary 4K release, Warner Bros. contacted Lawrence about being involved in the process. Lawrence then called on original Constantine colorist Dave Hussey to be hands-on with the transfer, meaning that the coloring of the new 4K was done by the same person who did the coloring for the movie when it was first filmed.
“And the tricky thing is always schedules, because I was shooting another movie when [Warner Bros.] started to want to work on it. But when they re-scanned the film to do the higher res version of it, I had them go to Dave Hussey, who did the color for me,” the director explained. “He was the colorist of of Company 3, who I had worked with for many, many years in the music video world. When we first did Constantine and he did the color, using a colorist and not doing color in the lab was pretty new. It was something I had to actually fight for when I made Constantine 20-plus years ago. But I got Dave to be able to do it and I got Warners to agree. And so the nice thing was I just asked Dave to do it. So it was being able to have the same colorist come back, 20-plus years later and be able to match all the work we put in together. So on that color front, it was the same thing when they then have their team of sound engineers at Warner Bros. Doing these translations from the old mixes into Atmos.”
Lawrence really had some input over the the whole 4K restoration process, meaning that this release is as close to his original vision of the film as possible. He definitely seems to be pleased with the end result.
“So I went in and met with them and listened to the movie and gave thoughts, but they’re very talented people,” he added. “I’m just very grateful that they listened and really incorporated Dave Hussey, my colorist, to come in and do that color translation. And just keep me in the loop, invite me in, hear me out. I think they did a terrific job.”
Constantine arrives on 4K UHD on February 18, 2025.
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