Deadline 11 august – Nearly 30 years after Mel Gibson and Danny Glover last shared the screen as Riggs and Murtaugh in “Lethal Weapon 4,” the long-rumored fifth installment finally has real momentum, and, according to Gibson, a script worth the wait.
Speaking with Collider’s Steven Weintraub at Fan Expo Boston, Gibson confirmed that he and screenwriter Richard Wenk have finished the “Lethal Weapon 5” script, which he called “better than all of the others.” Gibson, who remains attached to direct, described a story built specifically around where these characters would realistically be after nearly three decades, rather than a straightforward nostalgia play.
“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 said. “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.” He added that the new film “only harks back” to the earlier movies “in a minimal way,” calling it “a story all on its own.”
The project’s path to the screen has been anything but smooth. Gibson explained that the script was completed once before, only for the production to stall entirely at Warner Bros. “Richard Wenk and I finished the script, and we were going to go into production, but it just never got the wheels under it,” he said. “I think Warner’s got into some quicksand at that time… so it got buried somewhere.” With Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison currently attempting to absorb Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal still tangled in regulatory and financial trouble, Gibson floated a cautiously optimistic timeline: “Maybe they’ll take the chains off that one, and you might see that in another year or so.”
Notably absent from the update is original director Richard Donner, who helmed all four previous films and died in 2021 at 91 — meaning Gibson himself would be stepping behind the camera for the first time in the franchise’s history if the film moves forward as planned.
Danny Gloveris expected to return as Murtaugh, reuniting the pairing that helped define buddy-cop cinema through the late ’80s and ’90s. For now, “Lethal Weapon 5” remains tied to the fate of one of Hollywood’s messiest ongoing corporate dramas — but for the first time in years, fans have an actual script, an attached director, and something resembling a timeline to hold onto.