They’re still too old for this sh—. Nearly 40 years after Riggs and Murtaugh teamed up in 1987’s Lethal Weapon, franchise star Mel Gibson confirmed the long-gestating fifth and final installment of the buddy cop series is officially happening. Gibson has been attached to direct Lethal Weapon 5 since taking the reins from longtime Lethal director Richard Donner, who helmed the first four films and was developing the final sequel when he died in July 2021 at age 91.
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“I’m going to direct the fifth film in the Lethal Weapon series. Richard Donner, who did the other four, sadly passed away, and he was a good friend. He kind of tasked me with carrying the flag home on this one so it’ll be an honor for me to do that,” Gibson said during an appearance on Steven Oxley’s podcast. “He had gone a fair way with the screenplay, so we’ve used what was there and we kept poking at it. I’m pretty happy with it.”
Gibson, 68, described Lethal Weapon 5 as “funny, but it’s pretty serious too,” adding it “tackles a couple of hard issues.” Plot details remain locked away inside an LAPD evidence locker, but the tentatively-titled Lethal Finale — which has been in various stages of development since 2007 — will reunite the dysfunctional duo of Martin Riggs (Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover). Donner’s version was to be “dark” and “end [Lethal Weapon] on an emotional note,” Donner revealed in 2018.
Channing Gibson, who wrote 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4, penned that version of the script. By 2021, the script was reworked by Richard Wenk (the Denzel Washington-starring Equalizer trilogy, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back), and in 2023, it was reported that Edge of Tomorrow and Ford v Ferrari scribe Jez Butterworth — who sent off Harrison Ford’s aged adventurer in 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny — wrote the latest script.
In 2020, producer Dan Lin of Rideback (the Lethal Weapon TV series, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire) confirmed “the original cast is coming back” for the at-the-time Donner-directed sequel. “The story itself is very personal to him,” Lin told THR. “Mel andDanny are ready to go, so it’s about the script.”
Franchise creator Shane Black, who wrote the original Lethal Weapon and co-wrote the story for the 1989 sequel, revealed in 2016 he wrote an unused 62-page treatment for a final Lethal Weapon movieabout “an older Riggs and Murtaugh in New York City during the worstblizzard in East coast history, fighting a team of expert Blackwaterguys from Afghanistan that’s smuggling antiquities.”
“I didn’twanna do what people do when they’re trying to transition which is, theysorta put the two older guys in the movie, but really it’s about theirson! And he’s gonna take over and we’re gonna do a spinoff,” Black told The Playlist at the time. “F— that: If they’re gonna be in the movie, they’re gonna be in the movie — I don’t care how old they are.”
