If you're still holding out hope for Lethal Weapon 5, then Mel Gibson has a cold dose of reality. While revealing details what the long awaited follow-up would be, the actor and director cast doubt on it actually being made.
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Speaking with Collider, Gibson detailed what the film would include.
"It only harks back to the others in the minimal way, but it's a story all on its own," he said. "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."
He said the film would have been lower stakes and more character driven.
"It's low-tech," he said. "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. 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."
The film hit a snag when series director Richard Donner passed away in 2021. He had asked Gibson to take over if he passed away.
Mel Gibson Details Film
"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?'" he recalled. "I said, 'Shut up! You're not going anywhere.' And of course he did."
However, Gibson wasn't keen at the time to directly pick up the reigns. "When he passed away, I didn't say anything [about it]," the actor said. "But apparently he had told other people that, too, so they all came to me and said, 'You direct it.' I said, 'Yeah, okay.'"
However, Gibson eventually got together with a screenwriter to pen the film.
"I got together with the writer, and we completed it thinking, 'What would Donner do?'" he said. "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 is unlikely to be made given production issues.
"Richard Wenk and I finished the script, and we were going to go into production, but it just never got the wheels under it," he said. "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."
