I was so damn excited when I heard that the studio was going to push forward with plans for a Lethal Weapon 5 a little while back. As I mentioned in an earlier post, sometimes movies are more about their great characters than they are about great stories… and when you have great characters, you feel like you want to go back and visit them again and again. Well… Riggs and Murtaugh where two of those types of characters to me, and in my opinion you can’t visit them enough. Hell, I’d watch a Lethal Weapon movie even if it was just the two of them barbecuing some burgers for 90 minutes just talking nonsense and I’d still be entertained.
However, today brought grave and unwelcome news to my ears. Seems like the old producer, Richard Donner, is letting people know that Mel Gibson has turned the project down, crushing any future hops of me seeing these old friends on screen again. Such a shame.
Not one to shy away from patting his own back, Donner suggests that had the studio come to him to produce the movie instead of Joel Silver, Mel Gibson may have agreed and the film would have gotten done. An article in the LA Times reports:
“Mel turned it down. I would like to think that Mel turned it down because I wasn’t involved. Knowing Mel, I would like to think that. Would that be the kind of thing he does? It sure would be,” Donner said. “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.”
I’m not really clear on why you wouldn’t go with Donner if he was really open to producing it. Oh well… we don’t know everything and maybe the studio had its reasons… it just seems strange on the surface. Right now I’m just looking for who to be mad at because I really wanted a Lethal Weapon 5. Guess I’ll just go kick a puppy.
