Nearly three decades after Riggs and Murtaugh last shared the screen, Mel Gibson still hasn’t given up on making Lethal Weapon 5. The long-discussed sequel has spent years trapped in development, but Gibson has now revealed considerably more about what the movie would actually look like—and why he believes it could be the strongest installment of the entire franchise.
Speaking with Collider’s Steven Weintraub at Fan Expo Boston, Gibson revealed that he and screenwriter Richard Wenk completed the screenplay following the death of legendary director Richard Donner, and the actor-filmmaker remains committed to directing the project himself if it can finally escape development hell.
Gibson first reflected on why the original Lethal Weapon worked, crediting Donner and writer Shane Black with making Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh more emotionally vulnerable than the action heroes audiences were accustomed to seeing during the 1980s. He then dropped a much bigger update: Donner had already been developing a fifth movie before his death, and Gibson believes the completed screenplay tops everything that came before it.
“Donner realized it. I think he did all of those films, and sadly he’s passed away. But he sort of knew what he had, and Shane Black wrote a good script. It was timely, you know. It was ’80s. We were used to these tough guys on film who kind of had it all together, but they were tough and two-dimensional in a lot of ways. So this one was better because the main protagonists in the story both had kind of vulnerabilities, and one was crazy, and the other was scared, and it went a little deeper than the usual action flick.”
“There were good things about each one, but as you say, they tend to get diluted out there a lot. And, you know, Donner, when he was 90 years old, was working on the fifth, and of course he passed away in the middle. So I got together with the writer, and we completed it thinking, ‘What would Donner do?’ That’s what we were thinking in the room, and I think that the fifth script is better than all of the others. But it’s tied up in some kind of industrial film hell that you can’t extract it from to make it.”
What Would ‘Lethal Weapon 5’ Be About?
Gibson also offered rare details about where Riggs and Murtaugh would be decades after Lethal Weapon 4. Rather than trying to compete with modern blockbusters through gigantic visual effects sequences, the sequel would deliberately return to a smaller, character-driven style.
“It only harks back to the others in the minimal way, but it’s a story all on its own. The characters are quite different. They’re older. One’s retired. The other one’s on a desk job. He’s putting on too much weight, and it’s low-tech. It doesn’t get into the big explosions and all this sort of stuff. But it still has the energy and, I think, drive of a big action film. Like, let’s say for instance, Apocalypto. It’s a foot chase, right? But it’s kind of filmed like a car chase. So it still has all the elements of what was in the other films, but not nearly so complicated. But it deals more about the people in it.”
Asked directly whether he would direct the film himself, Gibson responded without hesitation: “Absolutely.” And the reason behind that answer is particularly personal, because according to Gibson, Donner explicitly asked him to take over the franchise if the filmmaker was unable to finish the movie himself. “Absolutely, that was the plan,” he said.
“Donner, God rest his soul, he said to me in this deep voice, he said, ‘Hey kid, if I drop off the perch, you’ll take this over, won’t you?’ I said, ‘Shut up! You’re not going anywhere.’ And of course he did. And, you know, when he passed away, I didn’t say anything. But apparently he had told other people that too, so they all came to me and said, ‘You direct it.’ I said, ‘Yeah, okay.’
Gibson then explained that studio politics played a part in why the script never got into the shooting stages, but he expressed hope that, with Warner Bros., Paramount and whoever else now involved in sorting out Hollywood’s chessboard, the movie may see the light of day at last.
“Richard Wenk and I finished the script, and we were going to go into production, but it just never got the wheels under it. I think Warner’s got into some quicksand at that time… so it got buried somewhere, and now I think this David Ellison guy over at Paramount has absorbed or will absorb Warners, or it looks like he will. And maybe, maybe they’ll take the chains off that one, and you might see that in another year or so.”
Gibson offered one final note of optimism near the end of the Fan Expo Boston panel. Asked whether he expected to direct another project soon, he once again singled out Lethal Weapon 5 — with Danny Glover also attending the convention. “Yeah, I don’t know what. I got about four or five guys, they’re all on the bottom drawer. Sure, I’ll drag something up, and hopefully we can get this Lethal thing up with Danny here. He’s here somewhere.”
There is still no guarantee Lethal Weapon 5 will escape development hell, but Gibson clearly hasn’t abandoned it. Until then, all four Lethal Weapon movies are currently available to stream on Tubi.
via Collider