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Lethal Weapon 5 May Still Happen After All
After previously stating the project may not happen, director Richard Donner has claimed Lethal Weapon 5 is still on during a recent interview. While the original Lethal Weapon wasn't the first buddy cop movie, it soon came to define the genre. The chemistry between co-stars Danny Glover and Mel Gibson played a huge part in this, as did Shane Black's (The Predator) quotable screenplay and Donner's robust direction.
The success of Lethal Weapon led to a small explosion in similar mismatched buddy comedies like Red Heat and The Last Boy Scout, and the movie itself spawned three sequels. The formula had gotten noticeably stale by the time of 1998's Lethal Weapon 4, though Black attempted to lure Gibson and Glover back for a fifth movie about Riggs and Murtaugh fighting mercenaries during a snowstorm in New York; that version was ultimately canned.
Talk of Donner and the team getting back together for Lethal Weapon 5 flared up again in late 2017, only for Donner himself to cast doubt on the sequel happening thanks to difficult negotiations with the studio. Now it seems the project is still active after all because during an appearance on Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, he very briefly touched on it. During the introduction where the hosts list off his impressive resume, Donner quickly piped in with "And 5 coming up!" after they mentioned the four previous Lethal Weapon movies.
That's obviously not much to go on, but given how downbeat Donner sounded about the prospect of the movie happening at all just a few months ago, it's an encouraging sign. With Sylvester Stallone having recently announced Rambo V and Schwarzenegger coming back for a new Terminator, there's no reason a final Lethal Weapon can't happen too. That said, hopefully the story will be a little fresher than the last couple of sequels.
Lethal Weapon is currently in the news thanks to a casting shakeup on the TV show version. The TV adaptation kicked off in 2016 with actors Clayne Crawford and Damon Wayans taking over as Riggs and Murtaugh, but Crawford was recently fired due to a number of onset incidents. Actor Seann William Scott was quickly drafted to take his place and will reportedly play Riggs' brother. Fox ordered a slightly shorter 13 episode run for season 3 as a result, possibly to see if viewers take to the new buddy dynamic between Wayans and Scott.
