Henry Cavill is letting fans know that his Highlander reboot is going to be something special.
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Cavill was on the Highlander panel at CinemaCon 2024, where he didn’t mince words in his tease of what he is working on with John Wick director Chad Stahelski:
“I’m a lover of the original movies, for better or for worse,” Cavill said. “It’s one of those things where reading the script for the first time I wasn’t quite too sure where they’re gonna go with it but my goodness me… what they’re doing with this… We are going deep into the meaning of these characters and their various trials and tribulations.
Cavill got the crowd (and media) really going with his next statement when he teased fans by saying: “If you thought you had seen me do sword work before, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
That is, of course, a reference to Henry Cavill’s former role as Geralt of Rivia in Netflix’s The Witcher TV series. That show required Cavill to train and master sword-fighting choreography to pull off some of the more intense action moments of Geralt battling monsters and/or enemy soldiers. Even if The Witcher has been criticized for its adaptation of the book series and games, Cavill’s action prowess as Geralt was overwhelmingly recognized, and are still generating hype on social media. Saying he and Stahelski will top all of that with Highlander is a big boast indeed.
The original Highlander movie is definitely built on the spectacle of swordplay – but it definitely did not impress with its action moments. Later sequels and TV series made corrective measures to make the swordplay of Highlander a major action spectacle centerpiece of the franchise; however, the Highlander reboot is coming out in the era of John Wick and other high-grade action films, which demand a higher level of action to impress modern audiences.
Narratively speaking, Highlander premise – a race of immortals that can only die by being beheaded, and gain power from killing one another – clearly leaves organic space for each of those immortals to be a master of weaponry and combat. They’ve had lifetimes to learn, and are motivated by the dual incentives of acquiring power through combat and/or defending against a rival immortal’s attack. In the hands of Chad Stahelski, it will be fun to see those seemingly “normal” individuals suddenly display combat skills no one suspects them to possess, and that the average human could never pull off. That includes fight mechanics like those seen in the new Crow reboot film, where an immortal can take serious damage in battle without dying, so long as their head stays on.
Highlander is set to start filming this year. CinemaCon coverage can be found HERE.
