You All Are Too Old To Even Consider This Shit
It would be great to be headline chasing, reporting, and writing about film culture if the people involved in the making of said culture weren’t being pressured by money people to come up with a “sure” thing every five minutes.
From the annals of a “sure” thing, comes this news, from the trades:
Sitting down at a recent producers roundtable with [shill media outlet], Dan Lin revealed Warner Brothers is looking to crank out at least one more [Lethal Weapon] movie featuring the original cast and crew, including Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, and helmer Richard Donner.
“We’re trying to make the last Lethal Weapon movie,” Lin says. “And Dick Donner’s coming back. The original cast is coming back. And it’s just amazing. The story itself is very personal to him. Mel and Danny are ready to go, so it’s about the script.”
What are they going to do? Drink Metamucil and make AARP jokes?
Don’t they realize that a weapon gets less lethal the older a man gets?
The TV Series’ Failure Revealed a Lack of Appetite
Warner Brothers already attempted to resurrect the Lethal Weapon franchise via Fox with a failed vehicle that starred Damon Wayans and Clayne Crawford that was on for three seasons and then axed unceremoniously.
A plot for a potential fifth Lethal Weapon film has been floated in the past before by writer-director Shane Black, but he had problems with the direction that Warner wanted to take the two main characters.
From the trades, yet again:
Shane Black unveiled a pitch he had for a fifth movie, something he says would be set during the worst blizzard New York City has ever seen. “I wrote a 62-page treatment with my friend Chuck for Lethal Weapon 5 that would’ve been, I think, a very good movie,” Black divulged in 2016. “It was interesting. It was essentially an older Riggs and Murtagh in New York City during the worst blizzard in east coast history, fighting a team of expert Blackwater guys from Afghanistan that’s smuggling antiquities. And we had a young character that actually counter-pointed them.”
He added, “But I didn’t wanna do what people do when they’re trying to transition which is, they sorta put the two older guys in the movie, but really it’s about their son! And he’s gonna take over and we’re gonna do a spinoff. F–k that: If they’re gonna be in the movie, they’re gonna be in the movie — I don’t care how old they are.”
What Are We To Make of All of This?
The fact is, we’re trapped in a cycle of derivative remakes and reimaginings of older, better stuff. It appears that anything new or original in the action film genre, in particular, the “buddy-cop” action film genre, is going to be on hiatus for a while.
When we have to reach back to grab nostalgia and “feels” to pull audiences in by using actors who are either past their prime, Danny Glover is 74, or who are past caring about these kinds of characters, Mel Gibson is 64, then Hollywood has got a creativity problem, not a “not enough nostalgia to get audiences in the door” problem.
Warner Brothers would do better focusing on how to solve that problem for the time being and let Lethal Weapon stay at rest where it belongs.
