Are you excited about the possibility of a Shane Black written and directed Lethal Weapon 5? Well, I’m about to ruin your day. Richard Donner says it ain’t happening.
Donner says – and the LA Times confirmed this – that Mel Gibson wouldn’t be coming back for a fifth installment. The aged director says that Mel would sit it out because Donner wasn’t involved, but the Times seems to think that Mel is too busy with his CGI adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or whatever big, personal projects he’s interested in these days.
Donner seems a touch bitter about the whole thing, especially towards producer Joel Silver, who he believes pushed him out of the project. “Joel Silver tried to ace me out of it. He tried to put it together but
made sure he didn’t do it until my contract was up. You know, it’s
typical of the man. A guy who wasn’t even around at the beginning when
we started on the first one. He came in late.”
Continues Donner: “It’s too bad, actually, because Channing Gibson, who wrote the fourth one, and Mike Riva, a designer on three of them, and myself and Derek [Hoffman, an associate at The Donner Company] had an incredibly strong story for the fifth movie. But we weren’t given the opportunity and I think maybe I could have convinced Mel to do it. But Warners chose to go with Joel Silver.”
Even if Donner could have convinced Sugartits back into the film, would that have been a good thing? Who sees ‘From the creative minds behind Lethal Weapon 4‘ and gets excited? Now, when you tell me that Shane Black is back… let’s just say that it’s obvious why Silver went with that script.
Speaking of scripts, Black apparently actually wrote one. I’d love to see that sucker get printed, if the movie never actually happens. We get so little from Shane that it would be a shame to waste any of it.