Mel Gibson gave an update on the long-gestating “Lethal Weapon 5″ this week, saying the sequel is “tied up in some kind of industrial film hell that you can’t extract it from to make it.”
Gibson says that he and the film’s writer, Richard Wenk, finished the script following the death of “Lethal Weapon” franchise director Richard Donner in July 2021 at the age of 91.
“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,” Gibson said in an interview with Collider during Fan Expo Boston on Sunday. “But it’s tied up in some kind of industrial film hell that you can’t extract it from to make it.”
Gibson says when the script was completed that the film was set to go into production, “but it just never got the wheels under it.” Now, “Lethal Weapon” franchise studio Warner Bros. is one of the assets at the center of a plagued acquisition by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance.
“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,” Gibson said. “And maybe, maybe they’ll take the chains off that one, and you might see that in another year or so.”
