Although NBC’s Constantine TV show was cancelled after just one season, that didn’t mark the end of Matt Ryan’s take on the popular DC Comics character. He resurfaced towards the end of 2015 in the Arrow episode Season 4 episode “Haunted,” and then in late 2017, he started recurring in Legends of Tomorrow Season 3 and was upgraded to a series regular the following season. Ryan continued to play the bisexual sorcerer until the Season 6 finale, though the actor stuck around in Season 7 to play scientist Gwyn Davies. Two years after Legends of Tomorrow was cancelled, co-creator Marc Guggenheim has clarified why the show stopped using Constantine, and the reasoning is so frustrating.
In addition to sharing his regrets over Earth-1’s Laurel Lance being killed off in Arrow Season 4, which happens to be his “least favorite” season, Guggenheim also spent some time on The Showrunner Whisperer talking about instances where he and the other Arrowverse creative minds were told by DC that they couldn’t use certain characters. As he says below, this is what happened with John Constantine:
I’ll tell you, the only time that bothered me, and I was off the show, as a showrunner by this point, the only time that really bothered me was Legends being told that we could no longer use Constantine.
So rather than the Legends of Tomorrow writers deciding that John Constantine’s story had run its course, it was DC that informed them that he could no longer appear on the series. So in the Season 6 finale, even though Constantine came back to life, he was once again damned after selling his soul to a demon, and needed to walk a different path from the other Legends. So he bid farewell to Zara Tarazi, his former love interest, and left her with a key that was revealed to lead to pocket dimension in Hell that looked like a replica of his house.
You may be asking yourself now why DC told the Legends of Tomorrow team that John Constantine could no longer be used. Well, when The Showrunner Whisperer host Andy Behbakht brought up how there had been rumors that the character was “pulled,” Marc Guggenheim said there were “probably a lot of truths of that rumor,” though he didn’t elaborate. Behbakht then noted how there was once a Constantine TV show that was being developed for Max, and that one could "put the pieces together” with that information. Guggenheim responded:
I would say that was a pretty realistic deduction, and obviously given the fact that show never came to pass. It’s particularly disappointing that we had to shift gears with Matt, who is not just terrific as Constantine, but just a terrific actor in general.
While it’s fortunate that Matt Ryan was able to stay on Legends of Tomorrow until it ended, I’m frustrated by how things turned out with the Arrowverse’s John Constantine. First off, though there are numerous instances of DC deciding that only one live-action version of a character can exist at a time, some exceptions have been made, like with Grant Gustin and Ezra Miller’s versions of Flash, and Tyler Hoechlin and Henry Cavill’s versions of Superman. Why couldn’t the same have been done with Constantine?
More importantly though, like Guggenheim said, this Max Constantine series didn’t even end up happening! Announced in 2021, the project, which was being developed by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot productions and would have been set in the DC Extended Universe, was scrapped by the following year. It’s also likely this DCEU version of John Constantine would have appeared in the Justice League Dark series that Bad Robot was also working on, but it too was tossed aside in early 2023. So ultimately Matt Ryan’s Constantine was taken out of Legends of Tomorrow for nothing, making it all the more annoying that his story ended by a corporate mandate rather than for narrative reasons.
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