Con Artistry: Constantine Creator Claims No Pay For TV Show

We didn’t write about the announced Constantine TV pilot that’s been announced as in production by Executive Producer of The Mentalist and The Dark Knight Rises writer David S. Goyer for a few reasons, the first being a sinking feeling – after all, we remember the Americanized Constantine movie with Keanu Reeves despite the liberal application of strong alcohol to try and dull those memories. But honestly, the second reason was that, if we were going to pay attention to a story about a treacherous liar playing with forces he doesn’t fully understand while throwing all his friends under a bus to save his own skin, well, until last night, we were pretty well covered.

But now that that distraction is completed (at least until the complete series Blu-Ray set drops in November), well, there’s still not a whole hell of a lot to say. No one has seen the script or the story bible yet and no one has been cast, so this thing could be anything from a well-produced and well-financed series about John Constantine wandering the world, taking on mysteries of the week while moving toward a larger, over-arcing Big Bad… or it could star Ted McGinley as a disgraced former cop-on-the-edge, tackling vampires mostly made of face putty in whatever city they want Toronto to double for this time around.

So we can’t yet talk about whether this show, assuming it ever actually gets made and shown, will be a good idea or the most modern iteration of, well, every genre TV show launched (and then scuttled) between the debut of Lost and the debut of Heroes (and we all saw how well that one turned out). But since this is a comic book property in the age of the Internet, the one question that we can ask is: will anyone involved with the creation of John Constantine – i.e. Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben – gonna make any bank from this show?

Sure! They’ll be making exactly as much as Jack Kirby’s family made from The Avengers movies and Bill Finger’s kids made from The Dark Knight Rises: exactly fuck-all!

From Steve Bissette’s Facebook page:

Notice to All:

As of this morning, it appears there will be NO payment to the Constantine creators for this series.

This option apparently rolled out of the already-paid-for option for the CONSTANTINE movie in the 1990s. Thus, we’ll only see $$ waaaay down the road, it appears, IF this series makes it to being a series. If it makes money. If it trickles down.

Will update you if/as we learn more.

But we will see $$ from any comics/graphic novels sold from the spillover of interest, FYI.

Hollywood accounting: gotta love it.

Look, this isn’t particularly any kind of surprise, regardless of the circumstances. For good or ill, it seems like pretty much anyone who creates something for the Big Two winds up finding a way to not get a whole hell of a lot – if anything – if their creation gets picked up for come kind of cross-production like TV or movies. And further, yeah: if the creators have some kind of deal that gives them a percentage of the net profits, they will be waiting a looonnng time to see anything from that. After all, this is the industry that tried to convince David Prowse that Return of The Jedi hadn’t made a dime in profit.

But what is most concerning about this to me – other than the fact that, once again, the creators of a character aren’t getting any money when that creation crosses over to mass media – is that, if Bissette is giving us the true reasoning for not getting paid, it sounds like the producers are claiming that this new TV show falls under the same deal as the Constantine movie. Which could very well imply that this show is intended to be an ancillary property or implied sequel or prequel to the Keanu Reeves flick. Which sucked out loud.

This is all speculation from a drunkard who hasn’t see the contract and has no real idea what the producers have planned or even if Bissette is really relating the actual situation between the creators and the producers. But it sounds like one of two things is going on here: either the plan is to make a television version of the Keanu Constantine (which nobody wants), or the producers are using the original movie deal as an excuse to not pay the creators (which nobody wants).

But the important thing to remember is that, no matter what happens with the TV show, Bissette, Totleben and Moore all get paid if you buy the Saga of The Swamp Thing trade paperbacks of Constantine’s original stories. And those stories are awesome and groundbreaking and beautiful to look at, and no matter how you feel about the show, you should be reading those.

(via Newsarama)