The reboot of Highlander has a long history, apparently going back to at least 2008, and has been variously attached to the likes of Justin Lin and Ryan Reynolds to direct and star, among many others. John Wick director Chad Stahelski has been attached since 2016, and was still talking up the film back in December 2018. Now, he’s announced that Highlander is still happening and that the production may finally be close to getting underway.
The director had this to say about where things are with Highlander right now:
“We’re in heavy development mode on Highlander. Tweaking the scripts, writing, conceptualizing sequences, how we’re going to do everything. We probably have a lot more in-person kind of things, but it hasn’t slowed down our development process at all.”
Of course, this could mean many things, especially since a script from Colony‘s Ryan J. Condal was reportedly ready in 2018 for a then planned 2019 release. So, we’d take Stahelski’s comments with a grain of salt, even though it’s clear that he has a lot of love for the property. Indeed, back in 2017, the filmmaker was even talking about turning the Highlander reboot into a trilogy, and wants to bring the same spectacular action from the John Wick series to the immortal-themed franchise.
For those not in the know, Highlander kicked off with Russell Mulcahy’s 1986 original picture, which sees Christopher Lambert’s Connor MacLeod as an immortal warrior having to deal with rivals to be the last of their kind. The 1991 sequel was, by many metrics, a creative disaster, although we have had three more installments of varying quality, with the most recent being in 2007. In the 1990s, we also received the long-running Highlander: The Series, as well as various other media.
As to whether the reboot of Highlander is going to happen anytime soon, we may have to patient, given the many ups and downs that the project has experienced over the last ten or so years. It’s also worth noting that Stahelski is down to work on John Wick: Chapter 4, while producer Neal H. Moritz has, as usual, many different projects in development. We’re still confident, though, that something will eventually come out, although we’ve been disappointed with this one before.