Director Chad Stahelski recently unveiled John Wick: Chapter 4 earlier this year and already has another project on the back burner. His reboot of the fantasy film series Highlander is slated to move forward, with Henry Cavill in the leading role.
The original Highlander film starred Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, and Clancy Brown. The story follows a group of immortals with ancient origins hunting each other down in New York City. The film was successful and gave way to multiple sequels, TV series, comic adaptations, and more.
Stahelski has frequently stated his desire to reboot the series, and, according to ComicBook.com, Deadline confirmed the project is moving forward.
The recent script draft was developed by Mike Finch, who also wrote John Wick: Chapter 4, and while production was slowed down a bit due to the writers’ strike, they’re still hoping for work to kick off in 2024. One reason Stahelski explained why the film took so long is that the film shoots to honor all aspects of the brand’s mythology and not so much make its path, like the John Wick films.
“I’ve worked on Highlander for years now, for Henry Cavill. Being retroactive is hard,” he told Deadline. “What’s different between Wick and that? With Wick, you weren’t serving seven seasons of TV plus two spinoffs plus five films. If I were to do a remake of Highlander right now, you’d expect a lot of mythology in those first two hours; you couldn’t explore stuff without it. Now, Highlander as a TV show would be amazing. You’d have time to build it out, see all those flashbacks and the potential of it. It’s trickier when you’re trying to do something with that big of a mythology. But I agree, that would be one to take a really big stab at. Here, we just had the opportunity to learn as we went on with Wick.”
The new film is set to begin production in 2024.