Mel Gibson Shares ‘Lethal Weapon 5’ Update: “I Think That The Fifth Script Is Better Than All Of The Others”

Mel Gibson is sharing an update on the development of Lethal Weapon 5 following years of the actor’s intentions to make the sequel.

In a new interview, Gibson gave details on what this fifth installment would look like and where the characters would be after all these years.

“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 told Collider while attending Fan Expo Boston. “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.”

Gibson noted that the film “only harks back” to the previous films in a “minimal way,” and that the new installment in the Lethal Weapon franchise would be “a story all on its own.”

As far as the action scenes, Gibson said, “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.”

The actor also said he would “absolutely” want to direct the new film, as that’s what the OG director, Richard Donner, wanted.

“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,” he recalled. “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 that Donner had been working on the script for the film when he died, saying, “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.”

Production for the film has not started due to the inner workings of the studio, with Gibson giving insight: “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.”

Lethal Weapon is a 1987 action thriller directed by Richard Donner and written by Shane Black, starring Mel Gibson as Martin Riggs and Danny Glover as Roger Murtaugh. The film’s success spawned several sequels, including Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998). A television series of the same name starring Clayne Crawford as Martin Riggs and Damon Wayans as Roger Murtaugh premiered on Fox in 2016 and ran for three seasons.