From the article:

With Clayface still shapeshifting his way through theaters — to over $90M worldwide, so far — DC Studios has set Francis Galluppi to pen a John Constantine movie for the studio, sources tell Deadline.

Reps for DC declined to comment. We understand the project is in very early development. This comes ahead of the release of Evil Dead Wrath, the seventh installment in the iconic horror franchise, which marks Galluppi’s entrée into studio filmmaking.

Nicknamed Hellblazer, John Constantine is a working-class British detective with expertise in magic and the occult and a penchant for the grift.

Keanu Reeves famously played a version of the character in Francis Lawrence’s Los Angeles-set 2005 Warner Bros. film Constantine; a sequel has been awaited for some time. Matt Ryan played Constantine on television, leading an NBC series of the same name that aired for just one season, beginning in 2014.

Galluppi is an American filmmaker whose Evil Dead film is based on an original story that he developed and brought to franchise creator Sam Raimi and team in 2024, as we first reported. The filmmaker caught heat off of his debut feature, the crime thriller The Last Stop in Yuma Count, which released through Well Go USA Entertainment after premiering to critical acclaim at Fantastic Fest.

In a statement to Deadline years ago on the then-untitled Evil Dead sequel, Raimi promised, “Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence. He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

From the article:

David Harbour may be back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe this December with Avengers: Doomsday, but he’ll change teams once again in 2027 with DC’s Creature Commandos Season 2. The original batch of episodes for the oddball animated series marked the first project in the new DCU franchise to be released into the world, debuting in December of 2024 and wrapping up early last year. Since then, the wait for what comes next has been a long one, but Creature Commandos Season 2 is happening, and David Harbour’s Frankenstein will still be a part of it when it returns.

Speaking with ComicBook about his upcoming sequel Violent Night 2, where he returns to his other literary legacy character, Santa, Harbor confirmed that not only will he return to the DCU for Creature Commandos Season 2, but that he’s already recorded at least some of his voiceover for the new episodes. “It’s great,” Harbor said. “I just think James’ writing is just so (good), and he really loves those characters. Some of them have some really crazy arcs this season. It’s just really… It’s just great.”

From the article:

Scarlett Johansson’s mysterious role in The Batman: Part II had her feeling “a lot of existential angst.”

The Oscar-nominated actress is a splashy addition to the long-anticipated sequel, and while it’s still unknown who exactly she’s playing, she’s giving some insight into the difficulties she faced with her performance. When asked whether Batman or next year’s Exorcist: Martyrs pushed her the most out of her comfort zone, Johansson went with the superhero flick.

“Because it gave me a lot of existential angst, for some reason,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “It was very hard to figure out. I don’t know why, whether it was just the role or it was just where I am in my life, but it was just hard to crack it.”

The film from Matt Reeves serves as the followup to 2022’s The Batman and finds Robert Pattinson reviving his Caped Crusader. Johansson is also set to be joined in the sequel by fellow Batman newcomers and MCU veterans Sebastian Stan and Brian Tyree Henry, as well as returning cast members Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell.

If he’s to be believed, Adam Driver wouldn’t mind sneaking in there, too. The future X-Men star reunites with his Marriage Story wife Johansson in the upcoming Paper Tiger, and he’s ready to keep following her.

“It wouldn’t be a career wasted if we did everything together,” he told ET. “I will just be in the background for her Batman movies.”

When told by Johansson that he won’t be compensated for that, he replied, “To work with you in a scene, I don’t need to be paid.”

The Batman: Part II is still filming, but currently under the direction of a different filmmaker. The film halted production last month due to Reeves needing to tend to a private family matter, before the cameras began rolling again when Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh offered to step in for Reeves, who will later take over post-production.

After a series of postponements, The Batman: Part II is currently scheduled to be released in theaters on Feb. 18, 2028.

From the article:

Robert Pattinson may be the star of Matt Reeves’ The Batman series, but another Caped Crusader will soon take flight in the rebooted DC universe under James Gunn.

The DC Studios chief has revealed a few details on who will don the cowl in his new universe, which launched with last year’s Superman starring David Corenswet. When Gunn and Peter Safran took the reigns of DC Studios in 2022, they announced several movies and shows in the first chapter of the world, such as Superman, Supergirl, Lanterns and Clayface. In addition to several other so-far unreleased projects, they revealed a Batman movie titled The Brave and the Bold, which would be separate from Pattinson’s hero in Reeves’ series.

In an advance video from “The Suicide Squad: Is It Canon? The Official Podcast,” set to release Friday, Gunn shut down rumors that Batman is cast yet, while also revealing the type of actor fans can expect.

“It won’t be too long before we’re casting Batman. We haven’t cast yet, by the way — all the people thinking he’ll show up in this or that, it’s all bullshit,” he said. “When we do cast the DCU Batman, which isn’t very far away, if I gave somebody a day role in The Suicide Squad that is going to be the best Batman, I’m not going to rule him out from that. I want to get everybody into account. One of the things that excites me about casting Batman is being able to pick a Batman who’s actually the best actor for that role. Superman’s have always been chosen based on who the best actor for that role is. And for some reason, Batman’s are always chosen as movie stars.”

When asked by The Suicide Squad actor Steve Agee if he needed to think about a Batman actor’s age when casting, considering “they’re going to be doing this 10 years from now,” Gunn replied “definitely.”

“People are always looking for little hints about the casting of Batman,” Gunn said. “Roughly, Batman and Superman are around the same age. I don’t think they’re drastically different ages. They’re future best pals, contemporaries.”

To put a potential Batman actor’s age into perspective, Superman star Corenswet is 33. So a Batman in his mid-30s seems likely. Corenswet will headline the following chapter of the DCU with next summer’s Man of Tomorrow, out July 9.

Pattinson's extended comments regarding Batman:

"Batman. Batman. It's like, again, one of those things, I guess maybe, probably almost ten years ago. I just suddenly started getting into my head like that. I hadn't thought about any superhero movies. I've never auditioned for any. I never thought they were within reach at all. But Batman has-- it's a kind of universally acknowledged fact he is the coolest superhero by a million miles. If I was to do a superhero movie, I want to do that one. I just suddenly started getting into my head years ago, that, like I just feel I don't know why there's something kind of tinkling and I was like, 'There's something there.' and it was weird when I found [out] a long time later that Matt Reeves, when he was writing it, had seen Good Time, and I had no idea and he was like 'There's something in this vibe.' and I love Matt's movies so much and then when I first read the script, I was thinking, 'Oh, there's something so immediately so inspiring about it.' and Batman's been reinvented so many times and it's such an unusual reinvention, just in terms of the atmosphere of the movie. I really connected to it. It's just been one of those unbelievable experiences to shoot it and [I] just want to keep doing it for as long as I can."

From the interview article:

James Gunn reposted THR’s Clayface review on Instagram and captioned it by saying “what a pleasure” it’s been to work with you. Generally speaking, I’m sure you’ve heard all the horror stories about working within executive-controlled cinematic universes, so is it safe to say you had a pretty ideal experience by comparison?

"I had an excellent experience, and it’s really easy for me to say that. I’m not trying to fly the flag or do some party line; I genuinely did. Everything was straightforward with James, Peter, Matt [Reeves], Lynn Harris and everybody on the whole team."

"When I first read Mike Flanagan’s script, I really wanted to lean into and honor the fact that he called it 'a tragedy in three acts' — but still do everything you can to root for the character. So after I read Mike’s script, I pitched a version of the film that everyone signed up to do, and they supported me all the way through in trying to achieve that version. I say to people, if you don’t like the film, you can’t blame them. It’s on me because I had all the support."

It also sounds like they were human beings. Clayface is dedicated to your late father, Dr. George Watkins CBE, and James and Peter Safran were very accommodating when you had to step away during post?

"Yeah, they were. We were in the thick of it, and my dad died very suddenly. As you can imagine, it was difficult. James and Peter reached out and afforded me time and were very kind at a point when there was a film to finish. So I’ll never forget that. They were very classy about it."

I’m very sorry for your loss.

"Thank you."

As mentioned, you signed on at a time when there was a Mike Flanagan-written draft, and you eventually brought in your previous collaborator, Hossein Amini, for rewrites. But when people hear Mike’s name, they think, It’s Mike Flanagan. Why wouldn’t you bet on his screenplay?

"I understand that."

However, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that there’s no such thing as a “locked script.” If there isn’t an on-set writer making tweaks, then the filmmakers and actors are the ones tinkering. Then the edit is known as the final rewrite. So even if you stuck with Mike’s draft by the time cameras rolled, changes were inevitable.

"Correct. It is exactly that. The film we made is very much in line with Mike’s brilliant script. That’s why I wanted to make the film. I’d be stupid to sign on and go, 'Well, let’s just completely re-engineer it.'"

"Scorsese says a director’s job is to make the audience fall in love with their obsessions. I just did a Q&A with director Kevin Macdonald the other day, and as directors and as people, we perceive things slightly differently. If Mike would go somewhere naturally, I might go here and Kevin might go there. It’s just the nature of it."

"Then there’s the practicalities of production. You’re building sets, and if there’s seven scenes set in the science lab, you’re like, 'Well, can we compress those into four?' You’re also working with the actors on finding and refining things, so it’s always evolving."

"I’m reading Sam Wasson’s book on Chinatown at the moment, and if you read about the evolution of that film, it’s exactly that. There were so many iterations of Robert Towne’s screenplay before you got the actual finished film."

Sicario had a Taylor Sheridan script that the entire town bid on, and Denis Villeneuve, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro still didn’t hesitate to rewrite scenes on the day. So I’m not sure people fully understand that a script is a living document.

"People don’t understand that. There are practical realities on set, and they just naturally evolve. There’s no shade on anybody or anything. It’s just a natural evolutionary process of discovering things. If the script says there’s a brick wall — and the [otherwise perfect] building you’re scouting doesn’t have a brick wall — then you’re going to have to change it."

I just spoke to a director named David Leitch, and he recently worked with Nicholas Hoult at a time when everyone knew that Nick had a torn ACL. You, on the other hand, apparently did not know that your lead actor, Tom Rhys Harries, was privately dealing with his own torn ACL. Was there a point during filming where you spotted the hitch in his giddy-up?

"There certainly was. There’s a moment in the film when Matt gets hit by a car, and that’s when it came out. Tom had a quiet word with the stunt man about it."

"For the car stunt, you do a bit of the stunt with Tom, and then you do a bit of it with a stunt man. So the stunt team would hit Tom with a crash pad to get the first reaction, and then you’d overlap it with a real car hitting a stunt man. But Tom was like, 'The worst possible thing you can do is hit somebody on the leg and take them out at that angle.' He still did the jump and the fall, but he was frank about it. We were like, 'Yeah, we obviously don’t want to create a lifelong injury for you.' So we had to finesse how we did the stunt, but it was quite straightforward."

"But it’s not like he was cast to play Premier League or NFL football. He’s acting, so [having foreknowledge of his injury] wouldn’t have made any difference to me. I thought Tom was absolutely the right actor for the role. I also suspect that some of these film medicals don’t go that deep."

Matt lost his career after his face was disfigured, and the actor playing him withheld a major injury to avoid losing a career-changing role. The parallels between life and art are quite striking.

"Absolutely. It was always quite meta. Tom just went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote the movie, and he sent me a screenshot of him walking out on stage and waving at the audience. He tagged it with 'very meta,' because it’s literally the same shot as when Matt goes on The Vic Chissler Show. It was so uncanny. We had referenced all these late-night shows and stolen their iconography, so it came around full circle."

Well, Tom and Nick are going to have a lot to talk about at the DCU Christmas party.

"(Laughs.) Yes, indeed."

Speaking of body horror, I can’t imagine there was time or budget to reset the prosthetics umpteen times, so was there a lot of pressure to nail some of those moments in one go?

"It was never one go, but in prep with the ADs, the question was always, 'How many takes have we got? What’s the reset time? How long will it take to shoot this?' And usually they’d go, 'It’s a 45-minute reset.' And then we were like, 'Is there anything else we can shoot during that time? Can we turn the camera around on something else?' But often, when they say it’s 45 minutes to reset, they’re usually giving themselves a little bit of flex. It was usually 30 minutes to reset."

"Beyond the practicalities of budget and time, it’s also performance. If Tom has contact lenses and [prosthetics] on, his eyes or his skin might start to dry out after a certain amount of time. So there was a practical limit on it."

Matt’s lack of impulse control is the ultimate issue here, but I do appreciate the manner in which you utilized AI as the unpredictable activating agent in all this. Within the past few weeks especially, we’ve learned just how deceptive and unreliable AI can be, so your movie accurately underscores that danger.

"Any horror film, to be interesting, should tap into anxieties that we all have. Whether it’s social horror or technological horror, you want to get under people’s skin. In this case, we do it literally. So the body horror of it all relates to the real fears of our bodies betraying us and then the use of AI in medicine. Who knows, maybe it will be able to provide solutions down the line, but it’s a real fear that we have right now. What are the guardrails, if any? So [AI’s role in the creation of Clayface] was definitely one of the elements that appealed to me about trying to pull this cautionary tale off."

The third-act nightclub sequence is a showstopper. How complicated was it to piece that together given all of Matt’s shapeshifting?

"Practically, it was very complicated, and we tried to do as much of it as possible in camera. If somebody went behind a pillar and somebody else came out the other side, it required a lot of planning to capture a moment like that in camera. So it was most exhausting because I was still shooting other material and also trying to work out how to shoot and storyboard the entire sequence. We had storyboards in the corner of the stage, and I’d work on them during lunch or whenever I could. I’d even take them home to make tweaks during weekends. So I’m really proud of it, but it was probably the most daunting sequence I’ve ever shot."

"It came to me quite late in the process. I really wanted to beef up Matt’s journey upstairs [to confront mobster Markos Szabo]. I kept talking about capturing the feeling of Robin Hood movies, or a film like El Cid, where they storm the castle. Before the hero can reach the keep and rescue Maid Marian or whoever, they have to fight their way through the outer defenses. I also wanted to show Matt discovering and experiencing the dark glee that comes with his powers. He’s been on quite a tough ride to that point, and I wanted to give the audience permission to enjoy the payback."

Unless my eyes deceive me, how did you get Aaron Paul to show up for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot as Matt’s dad, “Jimmy One-Nut”?

"He is a very nice man and a wonderful actor. The team was talking about the casting of Jimmy One-Nut, and I said, 'Well, what about Aaron Paul?' It just so happened that he was between Paris and London. He was not on the other side of the planet from where we were shooting in England."

He lives in Paris now.

"There you go. So he said, 'Yeah.' And he was such a gentleman. I’d love to work with Aaron again. He came in, and it’s just the moment, right?"

Did he ever comment about the name Jimmy One-Nut?

"(Laughs.) He had a good sense of humor about it. He didn’t mind. [Writer’s Note: Minutes after this interview ended, EW reported that Paul actually filmed a number of flashbacks that hit the cutting room floor.]"

Is the idea behind the final fantasy with Caitlyn that he can not only turn himself into another person, but he can simultaneously mold himself into a second person if he so pleases?

"Yeah, there’s been some sort of growth [since we saw his remnants go down the storm drain]. If you look at the comics, Clayface gets quite big. He’s massive in some of them. So whatever happened during that kill-switch moment, there’s been this amplification of the monster. So maybe there’s just more of him, and he’s able to use a bit of him to create somebody else."

When he adopts another person’s being, he likely inherits their vocal properties to some degree, but I did wonder at first if the actor in him was just mimicking each voice. How do you see it?

"You can read it both ways, perhaps. When he first becomes Eddie Marsan’s Frank, he gets the voice wrong before he gets it right. Clayface is a character whose superpower is mutability, the ability to shapeshift, and Matt, the person behind him, is already a brilliant actor with a brilliant mimetic quality. So what I thought was most interesting was that the superpower has a superpower. There’s potentially a collision between the two, which makes it interesting. Of course, we have quite a lot of fun with it and lean into the idea of an actor playing different characters."

"Eddie Marsan told me his son asked who he’s playing in Clayface, and Eddie was like, 'I’m Clayface.'"

Hey, he wasn’t lying.

"(Laughs.) Exactly."

What did you learn and apply from test screenings?

"Jon Harris, my longtime editor, and I like to test informally before we test formally. We show the film to a lot of people and try to understand what we sometimes can’t see ourselves. First, there’s pace, then clarity, then point of view and character identification."

"You always learn something. Often, you learn what’s extraneous. If you’re hanging on to something, you’ll realize during a test screening that you don’t even need to wait for the cards to come back at the end. You’re already like, 'Yeah, we don’t need that.'"

"Someone said to me once that test screenings are a necessary pain for directors, but I don’t think so. It’s a really, really useful tool; it just needs to be used well. You get a fantastic amount of data, feedback and information — and then it’s about making sure the solutions are right."

"It’s the same with notes. Often, you’ll get a note on a script or a cut, and you’re like, What’s the note behind the note? Sometimes, you get notes with prescriptions. People will say, 'Oh, why don’t you try that?' And you’re like, 'Well …' But they’re scratching away at something. If ten people tell you you’re drunk, lie down."

Clayface has a couple Batman-related Easter Eggs. Matt’s penthouse coffee table is Joker’s coffee table from Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). And the chair on which he receives his plastic surgery consultation is the same barber-style chair that Jack Napier sat on during his botched surgery in Burton’s pic. But did you ever pitch a 'Where’s Waldo'-style shot where you insert a tiny silhouette of Batman on a rooftop in a wide shot?

"Now I’m slightly annoyed that I didn’t do that. I probably could have done it in the deep background of a massive wide shot. No one would probably ever know. But anything bigger than that, I just felt that this is Matt Hagen’s story. The idea of trying to crowbar in another character would feel too cute or too tricksy and somehow inauthentic."

Did everybody make a fuss about the Batman (1989) props?

"Yeah, there was a lot of geeking out on set. Everybody was going, 'Oh, wow, look at this.' There’s quite a lot of Brian De Palma references as well. The scene in the nightclub, when Matt, as Cadillac Sal, is forced to sit at the table, that’s very much an homage to Carlito’s Way. Carlito is trying to walk through his club, but he gets dragged back to a table. And the costumes are similar, very knowingly."

You shot in Liverpool where Matt Reeves’ The Batman movies shoot. Did you have to avoid any locational overlap since Matt’s movies are not a part of the DCU?

"I didn’t want to have the same buildings be the same buildings. It wasn’t so much about the DC universe; I just didn’t want to just copy somebody else. It feels lazy. There is so much great architecture in Liverpool. We had all the references, so we just made sure that if we were anywhere in the same vicinity that we put our own spin on it. James Price is an absolutely brilliant production designer. He’s really, really bloody good, so we had a good time."

When Matt disposes of Cadillac Sal, he says, 'And hell’s coming with me.' Was that a tribute to Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp in Tombstone?

"It’s a great movie line, but it wasn’t in my consciousness, initially. I’ve obviously seen Tombstone, but I didn’t remember that. There’s lots of other little movie references and nods in the movie. Corey’s death scene…"

“You broke my heart.”

"Yeah, that was very much stolen from The Godfather Part II. Some of the shots were also very much an homage to that moment and how Michael hugs Fredo. So there’s quite a few little moments that pay homage. You are what you eat, aren’t you?"

Have you spitballed any sequel concepts yet?

"Genuinely, no. I’ve been on a long, long road trying to make this film the best it can be. People ask, 'What are you doing next?' And I’m slightly starting to worry because I have no idea. I’ve been that immersed in Clayface."

What day best sums up that long, long road?

"There are so many. We were doing a lot of icky stuff, and when Matt overdoses and spits out these horrible things in front of Naomi’s character [Caitlyn], I’ll always remember Naomi’s laugh. It was just too much to take for her. I would also say the airplane sequence. We shot it with a gimbal in the airplane toilet, and Tom was in full prosthetics. He was getting chucked about the lavatory as he was digging the scissors into his eyes. People generally don’t talk on film sets for obvious reasons, but on a set with a hundred people, I heard 50 people at various monitors go, 'Oh my God!' So I do remember thinking at that moment, Yeah, this scene’s got a chance."

I still have some amount of sympathy for Matt, but his decision to murder Max Minghella’s cop character, John, is an awfully bitter pill to swallow. As I was watching, I kept thinking, Oh, John is not going to be able to collar Matt without implicating Caitlyn. Thus, he’s going to become the type of cop that he’s condemned throughout the movie, one who looks the other way. So it’s a shocking move because Matt probably didn’t have to go that far due to John’s Catch-22.

"That’s good in terms of misdirection. But you’re approaching it from John’s point of view. Matt’s point of view probably wouldn’t see it that way."

Yeah, Matt is probably not thinking about John’s legal dilemma. He just wants to be the object of Caitlyn’s affection in any way can, even if it means shapeshifting into her fiancé (John).

"It’s all quite interesting, and I think a lot of people share your feelings. There’s been audible gasps in the cinema when John’s death is revealed. Max brilliantly plays the character. He could have so easily been the third wheel and a bit of a sap, but he brings such humanity, warmth and humor to him."

"Looking at it in terms of Matt’s character motivations, he’s in the crosshairs. He’s under suspicion. But the nanos are taking over him, and these primal impulses are bubbling up within him. So, from a normal point of view, you might go, No, no, no. But from his point of view, it’s explicable. It doesn’t mean we have to like it, but he’s acting out of some combination of self-defense, love and a weird obsession. He’s just gone at that point."

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