Despite years of rumors, filmmaker Richard Donner never got a fifth Lethal Weapon film off the ground. Following his death, rather than giving up on the idea entirely, franchise star Mel Gibson decided that he would take a stab at directing a legacy sequel for the series, which originally ran from 1987 until 1998. Gibson, who won both Best Director and Best Picture at the Academy Awards for 1995’s Braveheart, has only directed one film in the last 10 years — 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge — but hopes to tackle both the new Lethal Weapon and a follow-up to The Passion of the Christ, his blockbuster about the crucifixion of Jesus which earned over $600 million and remained the highest-grossing R-rated movie at the domestic box office until Deadpool & Wolverine.
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Each of the two presents a hurdle or two; while following up The Passion should not be complicated — star Jim Caviezel is up for it, and it shouldn’t be too hard to bankroll the sequel to a massively popular movie — there’s the small issue of Caviezel’s age. It’s been 20 years since The Passion of the Christ, and during that time, Caviezel has aged. The proposed sequel, which would deal with Jesus’s resurrection, would be set in the days immediately following the crucifixion, and he would presumably want the actor to look as much like his 2004 self as possible. Lethal Weapon, on the other hand, isn’t something that Gibson owns outright, so it could be a challenge to get a green light for it. So — which is coming first? Gibson doesn’t really know just yet.
“I don’t know, and that’s that’s the the the funny thing,” Gibson told ComicBook. “I mean, there’s various obstacles to getting any film up on its feet, and not just budgetary, but there’s like, there’s 1,000,001 reason why something goes and why it doesn’t. So it’s really kind of a crapshoot at this point what goes first and which came first, whether it’s the chicken or the egg.”
Note that while he acknowledges the challenges, it does sound like Gibson is still planning on working on both films.
Gibson has only recently returned to working on mainstream films, after becoming virtually unemployable in the mid-2000s. During a traffic stop, a seemingly-drunken Gibson ranted about “the Jews” — something that didn’t help his arguments that stereotypical depictions of Jewish characters in The Passion of the Christ wasn’t driven by bigotry. Not long after that, a number of his personal scandals leaked to the press, including audio of him being extremely cruel, and saying profoundly racist things, to his then-girlfriend.
Besides the cultural stigma of making blatantly racist and bigoted remarks, Gibson dealt with the fallout from an assault and battery conviction. All of this made him a hard sell for producers and insurers, although in recent years he has had roles in some mainstream film and TV projects, including Lionsgate’s John Wick spinoff The Continental.
