Mel Gibson says 'Lethal Weapon 5' is still happening

Дата публикации: 12-08-2026 22:38:50

'The fifth script is better than all of the others,' Oscar winner says

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Mel Gibson is definitely not too old for this s***!

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During a recent appearance at Fan Expo Boston, the 70-year-old Oscar winner made a bold claim about Lethal Weapon 5, saying that “the fifth script is better than all of the others.”

Gibson gave a hint at what’s in store for his character Martin Riggs and Danny Glover’s Roger Murtaugh in the upcoming sequel, telling Collider “the characters are quite different.”

Glover, who recently revealed he has been living with Alzheimer’s disease, would reprise his role as Murtaugh.

“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,” he said of the LAPD detectives played by him and Glover.

“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 (it is) not nearly so complicated.”

Gibson said he completed the script with Richard Wenk (the screenwriter behind the Equalizer trilogy) after the death of franchise director Richard Donner at the age of 91 in July 2021.

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“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,” Gibson said in his interview with Collider. “But it’s tied up in some kind of industrial film hell that you can’t extract it from to make it.”

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover starred in the first Lethal Weapon movie in 1987. Photo by Warner Bros.

The film was set to go into production, he said, “but it just never got the wheels under it.”

With Warner Bros. up for sale, Gibson said shooting on the sequel stalled. But he is hopeful that the film will still get made.

“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,” Gibson said. “And maybe, maybe they’ll take the chains off that one, and you might see that in another year or so.”

Gibson said he plans to direct the film, fulfilling a promise he made to Donner before his death.

“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 said.

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The original Lethal Weapon was released in 1987, with three sequels hitting the big screen between 1989 and 1998.

Donner wanted to end series ‘on an emotional note’

Talk of a sequel had been brewing for years.

The film’s original writer, Shane Black, confirmed to Postmedia in a 2016 interview that he had written a treatment for a fifth film that would have sent Riggs and Murtaugh to New York City.

The plot, Black said, would have seen Gibson and Glover’s characters transplanted from L.A. to New York City “during the worst blizzard on the East Coast in recent memory.”

In the midst of the storm, detectives Riggs and Murtaugh would end up taking on private contractors involved in an elaborate criminal smuggling scheme connected to Afghanistan and Iraq. “It was just a very visceral and powerful story,” Black said.

Donner hatched another idea and even gave the film a name a few years later. “I’m ready to do 5. It’s called Lethal Finale,” the director said in a February 2018 interview. “It is dark, but I wanted to end it on an emotional note … It’s heartbreaking.”

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Richard Donner with Brice Willis on the set of action thriller 16 Blocks. Photo by File photo /Postmedia

Work on a fifth film was confirmed in 2020 with Donner saying it would be “the final one.”

“It’s both my privilege and duty to put it to bed … It’s the last one, I’ll promise you that,” Donner told The Daily Telegraph.

After Donner died the following summer, Gibson said he had been tasked with completing the film on his own.

“I’m pretty happy with it, it’s good, I had a lot of fun doing it,” he said during a 2024 appearance on the Inspire Me podcast.

“(The film is) funny, but it’s pretty serious too. It tackles a couple of hard issues. I’m looking forward to it.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com

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