Henry Cavill’s Highlander reboot is still happening, the actor promises. With a targeted 2026 release date, Cavill will have been attached to the film for five years before anybody lays eyes on it — but after a lengthy development, the star says he is getting ready to train for the role now. Highlander, a modern myth about a chosen one-style swordsman, centers on a 16th Century Scottish immortal who wields a sword in a centuries-old conflict with other (less savory) immortals. Originally released in 1986, Highlander spawned three sequels, a TV movie, three TV series (two live-action, one animated), and an anime film (in addition to comics, web animations, and merchandise).
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Speaking with ComicBook.com in support of his new film Argylle, Cavill teased that his take on the part will be “a serious ride.” This comes as he has been saying in other interviews that he’s started his workout routine to get into shape for the film…but beyond that, he’s staying quiet.
“I’m not going to answer that just yet,” Cavill said, when we asked what to expect. “There’s a lot of work to be done yet on my part. It’s going to be a serious ride, I’ll tell you that much.”
Throughout the series, Connor MacLeod (and his “clansman” Duncan, to a lesser extent) does battle with other immortals, with the idea being that ultimately we want one of the good guys to be the last alive, because “there can be only one.”
The original 1986 movie starred Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, and Clancy Brown. The property was created by writer Gregory Widen, and the initial film was directed by Russell Mulcahy (Resident Evil: Extinction). Cavill has been attached to the new version since 2021, with John Wick‘s Chad Stahelski set to direct it.
“I’ve worked on Highlander for years now, for Henry Cavill. Being retroactive is hard,” Stahelski said last March. “What’s different between Wick and that? With Wick, you weren’t serving seven seasons of TV plus two spinoffs plus five films. If I were to do a remake of Highlander right now, you’d expect a lot of mythology in those first two hours; you couldn’t explore stuff without it. Now, Highlander as a TV show now would be amazing. You’d have time to build it out, see all those flashbacks and the potential of it. It’s trickier when you’re trying to do something with that big of a mythology. But I agree, that would be one to take a really big stab at. Here, we just had the opportunity to really learn as we went on with Wick.”
