Lethal Weapon 5 Gets First Update From Mel Gibson, And the Plot Confirms They’ve Both Gotten Too Old for This

Superman: The Movie (1978) director Richard Donner was already a legend by the late 1980s, but the young writer he partnered with for a new buddy-cop action-comedy film was still just a hopeful up-and-comer. However, Lethal Weapon quickly put Shane Black on the Hollywood map and set him on the path to making cult-classic films to this day. Donner would go on to make three more Lethal Weapon films, but never got to do Lethal Weapon 5 before he passed away in 2021.

Franchise stars Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are both still alive, and Gibson took the reins in 2021 after Donner died, and committed to ending the series with a fifth film, as Donner wanted. It’s been a long time since we’ve had any updates on Lethal Weapon 5, but now Gibson is speaking up again and confirming some key story details.

Lethal Weapon 5 Will Be A Geriatric Buddy-Cop Movie

Mel Gibson spoke with Collider at Fan Expo Boston and revealed the story concept of Lethal Weapon 5 to the crowd. “It only harks back to the others in the minimal way, but it’s a story all on its own,” Gibson explained. “The characters are quite different. They’re older. One’s retired. The other one’s on a desk job. He’s putting on too much weight, and it’s low-tech. It doesn’t get into the big explosions and all this sort of stuff. But it still has the energy and, I think, drive of a big action film… it still has all the elements of what was in the other films, but not nearly so complicated. But it deals more about the people in it.”

It sounds like the concept for Lethal Weapon 5 was going to be examining how Gibson’s character, Martin Riggs, is particularly struggling with aging out of being a cop. Glover’s character, Roger Murtaugh, began the series by coining the catchphrase “I’m too old for this sh*t.” In Lethal Weapon 5, it seems he finally puts action behind those words, retiring from the force. The fifth film already sounds like it will be more than just a movie: it will be a rumination on life and aging.

That makes sense, as Gibson also explained that Donner, “when he was 90 years old, was working on the fifth [film], and of course he passed away in the middle. So I got together with the writer, and 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.”

Warner Bros. owns the rights to the Lethal Weapon franchise, and it would be an understatement to say that the studio has been having a turbulent time of things. A merger with Paramount is still looming, and a project like Lethal Weapon 5 doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the studio’s list of priorities. It’s also hard to know how much enthusiasm there still is amongst aging moviegoers to see a Lethal Weapon movie that is all about not being able to do the same kind of Lethal Weapon movie they used to do. But who knows, some legacy sequels have worked, so there’s always hope.

You can stream the Lethal Weapon movies on Tubi.