Come Hell or high water, Chad Stahelski has every intention of getting his Highlander reboot out the door. Currently in development at 87eleven for Lionsgate, the John Wick helmer said in one recent interview he and his team are very much in development mode on the relaunch — in fact, Stahelski himself says he’s right in the thick of it.
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“We’re in heavy development mode on Highlander,” the director tells DiscussingFilm. “Tweaking the scripts, writing, conceptualizing sequences, how we’re going to do everything. We probably have a lot more in-person kind of things, but it hasn’t slowed down our development process at all.”
The reboot itself was announced nearly a decade ago, though Stahelski himself joined the project in 2016. In one 2017 interview, the filmmaker said he was ideal for the franchise because it’s essentially a fantasy version of what he’s done with Keanu Reeves on John Wick.
“There’s a great mythology, it’s got an action-design challenge. What would a guy really be like after 500 years of practicing sword-work? I’m still a stunt guy at heart,” he told EW at the time. “You want to reinvent gunfights, how do you do it? You want to reinvent swordfighting, how do you do it? And that’s where we are at now. I love the first Highlander and I think I’m in a pretty good spot. The creative team, the producers and the studio that’s behind it have kind of said, ‘It’s yours to play with.’”
More recently, Stahelski says he’s not shooting down the idea of turning it into a television series either. After all, the original movie spawned a six-season series.
“They did seven seasons of TV, and even though the TV show may not hold up today, the idea of it and the characters they brought in were super cool. So we’re trying to devise a methodology that leads up to The Quickening,” Stahelski said. “You just don’t end with a one-on-one battle in New York, cut off a guy’s head, and that’s it. We want to do this in such a way that it becomes more of a series whether it’s short form or long form that would let us explore that in the best way. I have a huge, heartfelt love and respect for the project, so we’re trying to find the best way to do it to give fans what they want.”
The Highlander reboot has yet to set a release date.
