Highlander Director Teases Reboot Honors Movies and TV Series

Director Chad Stahelski has been trying to get a new take on Highlander up and running for years, and while the ongoing writers' and actors' strikes are preventing any substantial development on the project, he did recently offer a promising update on the project. In addition to the filmmaker teasing that his take on the material would bring together elements from all corners of the mythology, he hopes that the movie could also plant the seeds for a sprawling franchise that could include a TV series, much like what happened with the original films. Stahelski also confirmed that Henry Cavill is still attached to star in the project, whenever it ultimately moves forward.

"I think we have some very good elements now. The trick is, when you have the tagline, 'There can be only one,' you can't just kill everybody the first time," Stahleski shared with the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "I'll say it for you first, our story engages a lot of the same characters and stuff like that, but we've also brought in elements of all the TV shows, and we're trying to do a bit of a prequel, a setup to The Gathering, so we have room to grow the property."

He continued, "Highlander, I can tell you right now, if we've got our sh-t together and pull off a feature, we've got ideas for days about how to make the coolest characters and make that an epic TV show. I just think that's a rich, rich, rich mythology. You can pick any period in time, any nationality, any culture, any type of person and make them an immortal that have to duel and deal with the burden of immortality? That's f-cking cool to me."

Earlier this year, Stahelski shared similar remarks about the nature of the sprawling franchise, which includes multiple movies, TV series, animated projects, and books that expanded the mythology of the movie.

"I've worked on Highlander for years now, for Henry Cavill. Being retroactive is hard," Stahelski shared with Deadline this past March. "What's different between [John 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."  

Stay tuned for updates on the future of the Highlander franchise.

Are you looking forward to the project? Let us know in the comments!