John Wick director Chad Stahelski is currently developing a reboot of the epic fantasy action film Highlander, and Henry Cavill is set to take on the lead role. The movie has been in development for years, but it’s actually getting really close to going into production.
Cavill recently talked about the project during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. He shared how big of a fan his is of the franchise and then said that the script for the film is “extraordinary” and that the movie will take some “big swings.”
“I am a Highlander fan, they’re great fun movies. Obviously I watched them when I was a lot younger and have since rewatched, but also the TV show. I really enjoyed the lore behind it, that sense of a tragic warrior with more of a story to tell than a cool guy with a sword, doing cool things, and this goes even deeper into that.
“What they’ve done so far and we’re doing with the development of the script is extraordinary, I think people are going to be really, really pleased,” Cavill added. “Big swings are important, you play it safe, you’re going to just go, ‘Eh, I suppose it’s fine?” but if you take a big swing, people love it or they hate it.”
I like it when movies take big swings to try and do something new and different! Matthew Vaughn recently did that with his Argylle movie, and while it was silly, I did enjoy it. It did things that I’d never seen before.
Stahelski previously talked about Highlander, saying it will include both familiar characters and “elements” taken from the ‘90s TV series: “We’re looking to do our story [and it] engages a lot of the same characters and stuff like that. But we’ve also brought in elements of all the TV shows. We’re trying to do a bit of a prequel setup to The Gathering.”
The Gathering refers to the culmination of the near-eternal battle among immortals. He went on to explain they are setting this whole thing up to expand and grow the story: “So, we have room to grow the property. We have ideas for days about how to make the coolest characters and to make that an epic TV show. I just think that’s a rich, rich mythology.”
The original 1986 Highlander movie starred Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, and Clancy Brown as immortal beings, who are hunting down one another and collecting more power. The classic tagline for the film was: “There can be only one.”
Stahelski also said the reboot is like John Wick with swords and revealed that it was being developed as a trilogy. He explained that they are taking the best story elements from across the franchise and implementing it all into one story that will be spread out across a trilogy of films:
“I think the TV series hit on a lot of great stuff wasn’t in the feature, between the watchers and all the different types of immortals. How do we get this into a feature mode before we dribble it into the TV world? Well, let’s restructure it in parts, let’s look at it like it was a TV show, let’s look at it like it was a high-end trilogy. How to we tell the story of The Gathering, The Quickenings, The Immortals and how do we really build this world out even more so than the original project? That’s what we’re restructuring right now. It’s taking all the good stuff that we had before I was involved in the project from the script; redeveloping the script to give us really good chapters one, two and three; and expanding the world.”
He also talked about his vision for the film, saying:
“The vision we’re trying to get across and what we’re trying to develop, I equate very close to Star Wars. The first one is a very satisfying ending but it does leave the door open and that’s kind of how I see this. I would really like to expand it over three. I see The Gathering happening over three. It’s tricky, don’t get me wrong, that’s why we’re still developing it. We want to be able to tell three complete stories that all kind of fit. I think the Star Wars trilogy, at least up to The Empire Strikes Back, is a good example of how we want to process it.”
It was revealed that the film is aiming for a 2026 release date.
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