10 Problems With Constantine That Got It Cancelled
9. A TV Budget
The beauty of Hellblazer is that John Constantine lives in both the squalor of derelict inner cities as he does in the phantasmagorical otherworlds from which demons, vampires, ghosts and all other manner of supernatural beings leap from. He's a regular Liverpudlian in a trenchcoat, using his street smarts to banish monsters to Hell. Doing the former is extremely easy to achieve on screen. You just go to a city (in most cases Vancouver, for those sweet sweet tax breaks) and you film there. For John and his human friends, you just need to cast regular people, too. When it starts to get tricky is when the bad guys begin bursting out of pentagrams and the like. It costs money to do somebody up like a devil, or stick a pair of angel wings on Michael from Lost. Money that doesn't really get thrown around a lot in television productions, meaning whenever the bizarre sight of something supernatural burst through into the real world the reaction wasn't so much shocking as erm, is that it?
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
