It’s been nearly three decades since the Lethal Weapon franchise lit up the box office, but Mel Gibson holds out hope that a long-awaited fifth entry in the series will soon make its way back into the public spotlight.
In fact, as Gibson told Collider during the recent Fan Expo Boston, Lethal Weapon 5 is all but ready to move forward in production, with the Braveheart actor shedding new light on what exactly viewers can expect to see.
“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,” Gibson teased. “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.”
Additionally, Gibson emphasized that he personally wanted to direct the film, allowing him to take over responsibilities from the franchise’s late director, Richard Donner.
“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,” Gibson said. “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 also said that he took over co-writing the script for the film after Donner’s passing, mentioning that the late director was busy writing the script until his final days.
“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?’” Gibson 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’s tied up in some kind of industrial film hell that you can’t extract it from to make it.”
