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.”

Paramount‘s Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim said that “everything is on the table” when it comes to finding a resolution to state attorneys general’s lawsuit seeking to block the proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

At a Politico conference on Tuesday, Delrahim also defended the company’s raising of the prospect that it would leave the state, amid reports that CEO David Ellison raised the prospect if no settlement was reached by Oct. 1. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is leading the state AGs lawsuit and appeared at the same conference hours earlier, called the threat to leave a form of “blackmail.”

“David Ellison was born here, lived here since I moved to this country. I’ve lived here. He’s raising his children here. His intent is to be committed to be in California,” Delrahim said. “There’s a point at which where you have a duty, a fiduciary duty to your shareholders, and those are all the factors you consider. But our goal is to be here.”

He added, “I heard the attorney general say that this was some kind of blackmail attempt for the lawsuit. It is not. When the delay starts costing you know after this merger has been approved from, I believe, 67 countries — European Union, China. Canada, Australia — let’s forget about the DOJ — but all of them have reviewed it this way. But this state seems to view this merger in a different market. You have to take a look at the business environment and look to see what’s best for not only the community, the business, and ultimately, go to the place where you are wanted.”

Ellison told a group of the company’s executives that he would start the process of leaving the state if Bonta did not negotiate a settlement.

California and 11 other states sued to block the merger last month, claiming that it would stifle competition for wide release theatrical film distribution, anticipated big budget blockbusters, and basic cable television channel licensing.

Paramount faces paying a $7 million-per-day ticking fee to Warner Bros. Discovery for each day that the merger doesn’t close past Sept. 30. But a federal judge last week set the trial for next March, and the deal expires in June. After that, Paramount would be on the hook for a $7 billion break up fee.

Delrahim also said that he takes Bonta “at his word” that the state AG lawsuit is not about control of CNN, amid fears that the Ellisons would look to move the network into a Trump-friendlier direction.

Ellison, Delrahim, “wants to bring it back to news,” as he pointed to the CEO’s op ed last week in The New York Times. In it, Ellison wrote that news organizations require independence, while he said that CNN and CBS News, which Paramount already owns, “are here to tell it straight down the middle.”

Even though Ellison claimed that the lawsuit was about opposition to his control of CNN, Bonta denied it, and said that merely divesting the news network would not be a settlement.

“I take him at his word. It’s not about CNN,” Delrahim said. “This is an antitrust case. He’s trying to protect movie theaters and cable operators, as alleged in the lawsuit.”

But Delrahim predicted that the AGs didn’t have a viable case. He pointed to support for the merger from major exhibitors, and when it came to the merger’s impact on cable operators, “it will fall apart because of the market definition.”

“There is no such thing as basic cable anymore,” he said. “Combined, if you look at streaming, the two companies will have something like 7% to 11% of the market share.”

That said, as Politico’s Alex Burns pressed him on the prospect of selling CNN as a way to “make it easier to get this deal done,” Delrahim said, “I was born in Iran. I moved here after the 1979 revolution. The single most important thing we have is the First Amendment. not because I’m a religious minority and …think people should be free, but also the First Amendment and free speech. If you start using state powers and wrap yourself around that to actually violate the First Amendment and control of content, that would be the saddest day in this country.”

He added, “But having said that, everything is on the table. We would be delighted to engage and discuss about any resolution to get this merger, to get this closing after all this time, in order to repair the industry, create more jobs, bring more jobs and production back.”