Mel Gibson Will Direct “Lethal Weapon 5”
Mel Gibson has said some heinous things, made some heinous threats to former partners and saluted the kind of people that make a reasonable person cringe with an embarrassing amount of disgust. And yet! With all that, Mel has been as successful at getting canceled as my Proactiv subscription from 2001 was (which is to say, I was receiving it well into Obama’s first term). Mel keeps working. He’s got the sequel to The Passion of the Christ, and Hot Seat with Britney Spears’ fiancé, and now he’s just been named as the director of Lethal Weapon 5. That’s how uncancellable Mel Gibson is. He’s able to resurrect a franchise that pretty much everyone assumed was dead after Lethal Weapon 4.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. wants to crank out another Lethal Weapon movie. Roger Murtaugh already told us in the first one that he’s too old for this shit, and so are all of us. But Warner Bros. doesn’t think so. After four films and a messy three-season FOX TV series, Warner Bros. is getting to work on a fifth film and they’ve taken Martin Riggs and put him behind the camera. According to THR, Warner Bros. had plans for a fifth film, directed by Richard Donner, who directed all four Lethal Weapon films, but those plans were put on hold when Richard died at the age of 91 in July. The good news for them is that they just so happened to have Mel Gibson’s number, and he answered the phone.
Mel Gibson is stepping behind the camera once again, this time to direct the latest – and likely final – installment of the Warner Bros. action franchise Lethal Weapon. This changing of the guard had been in the works for months and was blessed, if not instigated, by Lauren Shuler Donner, the wife of Richard Donner.
On Sunday, Mel Gibson was speaking at an event in London, and he reportedly told the crowd that Richard Donner personally hand-picked him to direct this movie. via The Sun:
Speaking at an Experience With… event in London last night, Mel, 65 said: “The man who directed all the Lethal films, Richard Donner, he was a big guy. He was developing the screenplay and he got pretty far along with it. And he said to me one day, ‘Listen kid, if I kick the bucket you will do it.’ And I said: ‘Shut up.’ But he did indeed pass away. But he did ask me to do it and at the time I didn’t say anything. He said it to his wife and to the studio and the producer. So I will be directing the fifth one.”
There is talk online that this fifth and final film will be titled Lethal Finale. Sources say that Mel Gibson will also appear in the film as his character, Martin Riggs. Fans of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia will note that Lethal Weapon 5 already exists (and 6, technically), a large part of which included Mac’s extremely wrong decision to play Murtaugh in blackface. You’ve really got to go the extra mile to make a Lethal Weapon 5 that will have even more people shifting uncomfortably in their seats than It’s Always Sunny’s Lethal Weapon 5. I mean, at no point during the It’s Always Sunny version have I caught myself thinking, “That asshole really said that shit to Winona Ryder, huh.”
Pic: Wenn.com