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.

Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee to become the next governor of California, recommended that state attorneys general and Paramount reach a settlement and avoid an antitrust trial over the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

Weighing in for the first time on the lawsuit, Becerra said at a Politico conference on Tuesday, “I hope it settles before court. It is easier to stand in a conference room and settle than it is to stand in a courtroom. I say that having had to stand both in the conference room and in the courtroom. You get way more done in the conference room than you do in the courtroom.”

Becerra, the former secretary of health and human services during the Biden administration, served as California’s attorney general from 2017 to 2021. That is the job now held by Rob Bonta, who is leading 12 state attorneys general in their lawsuit to block the transaction.

Becerra did not weigh in on the merits of the state AGs’ case, but said, “Having done antitrust cases, these are not easy. They’re a different animal from most litigation. They are very difficult. They are very fact intensive. The law doesn’t keep pace. All I know is this, in terms of what’s going on in this particular case, the entertainment industry is our baby in California. We have to fight to keep it vibrant. If a merger is good, that helps that keeps it vibrant, I’m willing to say, let’s take a look. If that merger undermines the ability of the industry of remaining vibrant, then I’m going to take … a closer look as well. At the end of the day, is it good for the entertainment community in California? Does it benefit California families to have another merger occur? And then, at the end of the day, who will settle it?”

Asked about reports that Paramount CEO David Ellison has raised the prospect of the company exiting California if no settlement is reached, Becerra said, “Having a major player in the industry leave would not be good. At the same time, I said as well, ‘Is it going to be good for working families?’ Having them leave leave the state is certainly not good for working families. So let’s be adults, not be kids. Conference room, not courtroom.”

Earlier, Becerra’s Republican rival, Steve Hilton, blasted the state AG case, calling it “totally politically motivated.” He said that Bonta’s arguments “just don’t add up.”

Bill Jersey, the Bay Area documentarian who wrote, directed, shot, edited and produced films for more than a half-century, collecting two Oscar nominations and three Emmy noms along the way, has died. He was 99.

Jersey died July 24 of congestive heart failure at his home in Lambertville, New Jersey, his wife, Shirley Kessler, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jersey earned his feature documentary Oscar noms for A Time for Burning (1967), about a white Lutheran minister’s unsuccessful attempt to connect to Black folks in Omaha, Nebraska, and Super Chief: The Life and Legacy of Earl Warren (1990), a profile of the Supreme Court justice that was narrated by Gregory Peck.

(As a “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” work, A Time for Burning was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2005.)

He also received an International Documentary Association prize and two Emmy noms for his work on the landmark 2002 PBS miniseries The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, narrated by Richard Roundtree, and created docs about the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus.

Jersey made most of his films for Quest Productions, which he launched in 1960 in New York City before relocating in 1981 to Emeryville, California. Starting in 1985, he ran the company out of the Zaentz Media Center in Berkeley, California (the complex also was home to the Fantasy recording studio used by Creedence Clearwater Revival).

Several filmmakers, including Gary Meyer, co-founder of the Landmark Theatres chain, had offices there, and Jersey served as a mentor to all for some 40 years.

“If a filmmaker wanted feedback, Bill was always there to help them, at all stages of production. If they wanted an honest opinion, they asked Bill,” Meyer told the Chronicle. “Bill helped shape many projects into finished films.” 

The San Francisco International Film Festival paid tribute to Jersey by screening a selection of his documentaries in 1990.

William Clifford Jersey Jr. was born in Queens on June 9, 1927, and raised on Long Island in Port Washington. His father, Clifford, was a bank teller, and his mother, Alice, was a cook in a high school cafeteria.

After graduating from Northport Union School in 1945, Jersey served in the U.S. Navy, then attended Houghton College in New York, Wheaton College in Illinois and the USC School of Cinematic Arts, earning his master’s degree in 1957.

His first screen credits came as an art director on films including Manhunt in the Jungle and the Steve McQueen-starring The Blob, both released in 1958.

After moving back east, Jersey launched Quest and wrote, directed and produced for the anthology series The DuPont Show of the Week, where one 1963 episode, “Manhattan Battleground,” about a Quaker social worker in New York’s Spanish Harlem, got him his first Emmy nom.

His credits included Faces of the Enemy (1987), about the psychology of dehumanizing a military adversary; Naked to the Bone (1997), about MRI imaging; Eames: The Architect & the Painter (2011), about the modernist designers Charles and Ray Eames (that doc won a Peabody Award); and American Reds: The Rise and Fall of the American Communist Party (2016).

His work tackled such other subjects as Abraham Lincoln, the conflict between creationists and evolutionists, Maya Angelou, organized crime, U.S.‑Soviet relations, the Italian Renaissance and the search for an AIDS vaccine. He also taught at San Francisco State.

When he wasn’t making documentaries, Jersey was a landscape painter. After spending his last 18 years on the East Coast, he died in his studio surrounded by his art, his wife said.

In addition to Kessler, whom he married in 1985, survivors include his children, Beth, Todd, Brian, Colin and Josh.

“If I could use one word to describe my dad, it is ‘big,’” Beth told the Chronicle. “He was larger than life because he would go off and make these amazing films and win all these awards. And he never had a script.”