Lethal Weapon 5 script called series-best; plot details revealed; Gibson still hopes to make it

Here we go again with Lethal Weapon 5 rumours. Yes, seriously. You'd think after Richard Donner passed, that would be curtains for another round of Riggs and Murtaugh, but apparently Mel Gibson hasn't given up on dragging the franchise back for one more run. And, fair play to him, he's got opinions about the script and why this latest outing would top the rest.

Where's the Film Now?

Bit of background for anyone who's not been tracking the saga: Donner had been working on a fifth entry before he died, and Gibson originally circled the director's chair himself as a sort-of tribute. Fast-forward a bit, and we get the bombshell from Danny Glover — Murtaugh himself — that he'd been quietly dealing with Alzheimer's for years. Not the news you'd want if you're banking on a buddy-cop revival. Frankly, most people would have conceded the film was off the table at that point.

Except Gibson is still banging the drum. At Fan Expo Boston, he said he thinks it can still happen, and actually, he's got the script ready to go — something he co-finished with Richard Wenk. According to Gibson, they tackled the draft with one guiding thought: 'What would Donner do?'

Gibson told Collider, 'We completed it thinking, "What would Donner do?" That’s what we were thinking in the room, and I think that the fifth script is better than all of the others. But it’s tied up in some kind of industrial film hell that you can’t extract it from to make it.'

The holdup feels all-too-familiar: endless studio faff. Gibson reckons once Paramount fully absorbs Warner Bros. (which, yes, is a thing apparently happening thanks to David Ellison), the project could be dug out of the mud. As he tells it, Warner got stuck in 'quicksand', the script was shelved, and it may take this merger to break it free. He thinks there’s a chance the film might actually move into production in a year or so, provided all the studio chess pieces land as hoped.

What Gibson Says About the Plot

No official reveal for the story, but Gibson let slip a few bits that make it clear this won’t just be another copy-paste action flick. The new script apparently dials the mayhem right down — less carnage, more character stuff. Imagine the scale dropped back to closer to the first film than the explosion-heavy sequels:

• It largely stands on its own, minimal callbacks aside.
• Both leads are now proper old: one’s hit retirement, the other’s landed a desk job and, by the sounds of it, developed a bit of a gut.
• Low-tech approach — forget big set-piece blowups; the tension comes from energy and pacing rather than brute spectacle.
• The foot chases are shot like car chases (Gibson compared it to Apocalypto, of all things).
• Beneath the action, more focus on character and what makes them tick than before.

Definite vibe of scaling back the chaos but leaving the adrenaline intact.

Nostalgia for the Original

Gibson had a bit of a moment reflecting on what worked so well with the very first Lethal Weapon, nodding to Shane Black’s now-iconic script. He talked up the way the original bucked the trend for tough-guy, two-dimensional protagonists, instead making room for real vulnerability and a bit of psychological edge.

Gibson told the publication, 'It was timely, you know. It was ’80s. We were used to these tough guys on film who kind of had it all together, but they were tough and two-dimensional in a lot of ways. So this one was better because the main protagonists in the story both had kind of vulnerabilities, and one was crazy, and the other was scared, and it went a little deeper than the usual action flick.'