Jason Constantine, Lionsgate exec for 'John Wick,' 'Saw,' dies at 55
Lionsgate Motion Picture Group co-president Jason Constantine died Thursday at 55. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
June 5 (UPI) -- Lionsgate Motion Picture Group co-president Jason Constantine died Thursday after a battle with cancer, the studio announced. He was 55.
Under his tenure, Constantine oversaw Lionsgate original franchises such as John Wick, Saw and The Expendables. Lionsgate credits Constantine championing Saw from the "reverse bear trap" concept short James Wan directed with co-writer Leigh Whannell wearing the trap.
The latest John Wick film, Ballerina, is in theaters Friday and Saw 11 is in development. Constantine rose from the role of director of acquisitions 25 years ago to co-president.
Lionsgate also credited Constantine's direct involvement on their Best Picture winner Crash, the Oscar-wining Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire, the original Knives Out and more.
"His career was built around the principles that a great idea can come from anywhere, a box office triumph is meant to be shared by an entire team and our creative choices need to be bold and daring," Lionsgate said in a statement. "With his fearless spirit, creative energy and enduring talent relationships, Jason embodied the very best of our studio and our industry."
Constantine's family asks for donations to be made to Dr. Michael Lim's Research at Standford Medicine or the neuro-oncology team led by Dr. Tim Cloughesy and Dr. Robert Chong at UCLA in lieu of flowers.
Notable deaths of 2025
Jill Sobule Jill Sobule attends the GLAAD Media Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 30, 2023. Sobule, the
Jill Sobule attends the GLAAD Media Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 30, 2023. Sobule, the singer-songwriter behind "I Kissed a Girl," "Living Color" and "Supermodel," died at the age of 66 on May 2 from a house fire. Photo by Greg Grudt/UPI | License Photo
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Below, as part of The Hollywood Reporter's Titan interview series, Stahelski talks about all things Wick — and being a lone warrior fighting an endless line of studio suits. Last year, Lionsgate announced that you now have 'franchise oversight' over the world of John Wick. How much power does that actually entail? I don't know the answer. I promise you, James, I am pushing to find out. We seem to be doing something right, yet with every [movie], there is a bit of an argument. Now, I get it. Studios have to deal with a varying degree of talent and vision and some people fall short of doing what they say. Sometimes [studios are] told, 'You don't understand my vision' and it's a cop out for 'I have no idea what my vision is.' If I said to you, for John Wick 3: 'I'm not going to do anything that's worked before, I'm going to have a bunch of dogs that bite crotches, and I'm going to kill 186 people.' Are you going to give me $100 million for that? 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And because we've done okay financially with each one, it allowed us to increase the budget and keep doing more of the same — hopefully, in a better way, while expanding the mythology. Watching the documentary, I marveled at the studio notes on the first movie: They didn't want you to kill the dog or for Wick to execute the villain played by Alfie Allen, and they wanted the bad guys to have poisoned Wick's wife instead of her dying of natural causes. I always wonder when I hear stories like this: After the movie is a hit, does anybody say, 'We were wrong about literally all those things'? That happened once. On John Wick 2, there was disagreement with someone very high up in the studio over John Wick doing euthanasia-assist to a character called Gianna (Claudia Gerini). It was, 'Oh my God, we can't have John Wick just kill her!' We're not killing her. She had already slit her wrists and John Wick offers a way out that's more honorable. They wanted two versions. We came out of the test screening and the audience was way more on board with what's in the final film. The executive didn't miss a beat, they just went, 'You were right, I was wrong.' To their credit. It was pretty cool. But no one gets this: Even if you do a bake-off with two versions in test screenings, you would need the same audience to watch both versions to compare them, because audiences are different. But that never happens. I think you can learn a lot from test screenings, but I don't think you can make choices based on them without showing the audience everything. You weren't really involved with TV series. Were there any creative lessons to be learned from that in terms of how to expand this universe? Keanu and I were — I wouldn't say sidelined, but our opinion was heard and not really noted. [The studio] tried to convince me they knew what they were doing. A group of individuals thought they had the magic sauce. But if you take out Basil Iwanyk's producing intuitiveness, if you take out Keanu's way of delivering quirky dialogue and if you take out all the visuals I have in my head from Wong Kar-wai, anime, Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci or Andrei Tarkovsky … then it's not the same thing. They thought this was as easy as using anamorphic lenses, do a kooky hotel, put in weird dialogue, and insert crime drama. If you saw our process, you'd be like, 'You're telling me this billion dollar franchise does it this way?' I'm scouting my next film in London and we saw a cool location yesterday which totally changed the second act. We rewrote the whole thing. I find great cast members and rewrite their parts constantly. That's what makes [the movies] so good and organic — we're constantly upgrading. But the studio likes to know what they're getting for their buck and want to lock a script for budget reasons. While we're saying, 'Just write the check, we'll see you at the finish line.' You had the premiere of (which just gave ) Tuesday night. How did that go? It seemed to go pretty good. English audiences don't laugh much. Everybody seemed to really enjoy it … We were very fortunate to find Ana de Armas and the enthusiasm and punch she has. There's got to be a love if you're coming into our franchise. Sometimes I'll call the agencies and ask, 'Who loves John Wick?' Norman Reedus bumped into Keanu one day and said, 'Hey man, I love the Wicks' [and was cast in Ballerina]. Every cast member we've got has been a fan of the previous films. They come to work and it's a different vibe because they understand the world. Do you ever lay awake at night and worry that the world of only works with John Wick? Because that's a scary question, right? Keanu and I actually just talked about this. Look, it's always tricky. I think the world can be supported as long as you don't go crazy and carpet bomb. What we're doing now are stories we really want to tell that feel organic. You've seen Alice in Wonderland. Now what about the Rabbit? What about the Cheshire Cat? Also, sometimes in your own franchise, you get so far up your own ass with the mythology that by the 10th movie you don't know what's going on. I don't ever want to get that way with Wick. I want each one to be able to stand alone. Was Keanu always supposed to appear in ? That wasn't in the original script. To be honest, I was kind of against it. But I do see the benefit and we wanted to help out [director Len Wiseman]. We had just opened John Wick 4 and it was huge. He couldn't go back to the model of the first John Wick and do a little $18 million indie thing and try to build it up. In order to stay in the same game, you got to give him a fighting chance. And the easiest way to transfer that over — at least, from the studio point of view — was have Wick in Ballerina in a special timeline. Does he appear in ? The Donny Yen spinoff doesn't have the John Wick character. It's got Donny Yen and it's an ode to kung fu movies. If John Wick 1 was about Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, this is about Chow Yun-fat, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. So I think that one is a little easier to get it across to audiences because it's in a sub-genre of what we love. The documentary shows the incredible amount of training Keanu undertakes, and his punishment seems to ramp up higher for each movie. He's now 60. If you do another with him, there has to be a limit to how hard you can push this guy, right? Because at a certain point, things break. What do you do if you're a world-class sprinter in your twenties and you don't run so fast at 30? You start doing marathons — because marathon runners hit their prime in their mid-to-late thirties. You got to deal with the turns. For the first John Wick, Keanu had a really bad knee injury and he couldn't punch and kick. So we came up with the Jiujitsu and gun-fu. We're not going to lower the bar. 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I know you've heard this before. But ended so well that there is a certain amount of … like there's this feeling that nothing popular is allowed to end anymore. I'm with you, man. Keanu and I have discussed this many times and feel the same way. We finished 3 and thought that was going to be the last one. Look, we never expected to end John Wick. I just hate cheesy endings. I hate happy endings. Over a long enough timeline, everything's a fucking tragedy. If you kill 86 people, you don't get away. So when we got to 4, we wanted to have something that had a lot of fate and consequence. The ending was going to be a cliffhanger. Then we were sitting in Japan [during the filming of 4] going, 'We didn't stick the landing.' [Our original ending] kind of sucked. 'Fuck, we got to finish this, right?' So I was really happy with the way 4 ended. It was Keanu and I saying, 'Thank you, it's been awesome, but it is time to go.' I didn't want to overstay our welcome. 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When he runs through the glass barefoot, I'm fucking in — that's what you have to do. I could do the exact same choreography that's in John Wick, but if you didn't love Keanu Reeves as John Wick, we wouldn't be talking right now. There are better athletes than Jackie Chan— But we love Jackie Chan. You fucking love him! For the longest time, [the industry consensus] was, 'It's not about the action, it's about the story.' That's not true. And then there was, 'It's not about stories, it's about the action.' That's not true! You have to conceive the whole thing together. So biggest problem with action movies is people think they're making two separate movies. The story doesn't stop just because there's punching and kicking. In some of the superhero stuff, when a second unit guy is doing half the movie, everything looks different during the action. Even the coloring and editing is different. [The film] never feels aligned. 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