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!