Hollywood spins the big wheel, lands on "bring back Mel Gibson and Danny Glover for Lethal Weapon 5"
Apparently bound and determined to keep the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia Gang from simply notching a gosh-dang win for once, Lethal Weapon TV show producer Dan Lin is still out here banging a drum for the possibility of a movie that it’s very nearly impossible to imagine anyone has any actual, real-world demand for at this point: Lethal Weapon 5, starring original cast members Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. This is per The Hollywood Reporter, which talked to Lin this week about his recurring fever dreams in which the two men are too old for this shit, and also we are too old for this shit, and the shit is also maybe even way too old for itself.
All of this is, presumably, spurred on by the modest success of this month’s Bad Boys For Life, Hollywood’s latest reminder that old buddy cop pairings never die, they just wait to become modestly lucrative for their parent companies once again. But while Smith and Lawrence had to make do without their old pal Michael Bay this go-round, the most interesting about Lin’s pitch for reviving the husks of Riggs and Murtaugh from their well-earned rest—besides being another data point in the slow and slimy path Gibson has taken back to America’s darling-hood—is that he also thinks he can get original series director Richard Donner back on board. “Dick Donner’s coming back,” Lin said, having apparently coaxed the Superman director out of the retirement he’s been in since 2006's 16 Blocks. “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.”
As much as we might mock this sort of video necromancy, the idea that there’s at least some interest in the aging franchise still knocking around isn’t entirely off-base; the Lethal Weapon TV did decent-for-a-TV-police-procedural numbers, and was killed off as much for its copious backstage drama as for America’s waning interest in the ever-present threat of toilet bombs with diplomatic immunity. Still, Lin made it clear that no one is going forward with this project until a script and a story worthy of these iconic characters is firmly in place; we can only assume phrases like “Now I’m really too old for this shit!” and “Die Hard in an old folk’s home?—Call Pesci’s agent for possible lunch” are already being hastily jotted down in Hollywood’s most active think tanks.