Mel Gibson Shares LETHAL WEAPON 5 Update: “I Think That The Fifth Script Is Better Than All Of The Others”

It’s been nearly 30 years since Riggs and Murtaugh last tore through Los Angeles together, and Mel Gibson still wants to get Lethal Weapon 5 made. Even better, he thinks the script they’ve got may be the best one in the entire franchise.

The long-in-development sequel has spent years trying to escape Hollywood limbo, but Gibson recently offered some new details about the story, his plans to direct, and how the late Richard Donner remains a major part of the movie’s DNA.

If the film finally happens, don’t expect Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh to simply pick up where they left off in 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4. Time has caught up with these guys, and Gibson says the movie embraces that rather than pretending its aging heroes can still operate exactly as they did decades ago.

While speaking with Collider at Fan Expo Boston, Gibson explained: “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. 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.”

That actually sounds like a pretty great approach for another Lethal Weapon movie. Riggs and Murtaugh don’t need to be leaping from skyscrapers or trying to compete with the increasingly insane scale of modern action franchises. These movies worked because Gibson and Danny Glover were so damn entertaining together.

According to Gibson, the fifth movie will only “harks back” to the previous installments in a “minimal way.” Instead of leaning heavily on nostalgia and callbacks, Lethal Weapon 5 is being designed as “a story all on its own.”

The action is also being scaled around the characters and their age without completely taking the foot off the gas. Gibson offered an example involving a sequence that turns something as simple as running after somebody into a bigger cinematic set piece:

“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.”

That sounds much more interesting than watching Riggs suddenly transform into an indestructible action superhero in his late 60s. The original Lethal Weapon had plenty of action, but its real engine was always its characters, particularly the relationship between Riggs and Murtaugh. Putting the focus back on those guys could give the fifth film a reason to exist beyond nostalgia.

Gibson also confirmed that he would “absolutely” direct Lethal Weapon 5, fulfilling a request Donner made before his death in 2021.

Gibson recalled the conversation: “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.’”

Donner directed all four Lethal Weapon films, making him inseparable from the identity of the franchise. He was also actively developing the fifth movie before his death, and Gibson eventually teamed with screenwriter Richard Wenk to finish what Donner had started.

Gibson explained that they approached the screenplay by continually asking themselves what Donner would have done with the story. The result is a script Gibson has some serious confidence in:

“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.”

Calling Lethal Weapon 5 better than every previous script is a hell of a claim, especially when the original movie came from Shane Black and remains one of the defining buddy-cop action films of the 1980s.

Unfortunately, having a script that Gibson loves hasn’t been enough to get cameras rolling. The project has remained trapped in studio complications, and Gibson says he and Wenk had reached the point where they expected the movie to enter production before everything stalled.

“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.”

So, Lethal Weapon 5 still isn’t officially heading into production, but Gibson clearly hasn’t given up on it. The original Lethal Weapon arrived in 1987, with Donner directing Black’s screenplay and Gibson starring as the volatile Martin Riggs opposite Glover as veteran LAPD detective Roger Murtaugh.

The movie became a massive action hit and launched a franchise that continued with Lethal Weapon 2 in 1989, Lethal Weapon 3 in 1992, and Lethal Weapon 4 in 1998.

The property was later revived for television, with Clayne Crawford taking over the role of Riggs and Damon Wayans playing Murtaugh. Fox’s Lethal Weapon series premiered in 2016 and ultimately ran for three seasons.

After such a long absence from the big screen, the best way to bring Lethal Weapon back probably isn’t trying to recreate what these characters were doing in 1987. Riggs and Murtaugh are older, their lives have changed, and the action should change with them.

A lower-tech, character-focused action movie about two aging cops getting dragged into another mess sounds like it could be a lot of fun, especially if Gibson and Glover can recapture that chemistry. Add in Donner’s involvement with the original development of the story, and there’s something here worth seeing through.

Now somebody just needs to get Lethal Weapon 5 out of “industrial film hell” and actually make the damn thing.