Back in November of 2016 it was announced that John Wick co-director Chad Stahelski had signed on to helm Lionsgate’s long-planned reboot of the classic 1986 action fantasy Highlander.
Since then, Stahelski has found himself a little sidetracked with John Wick: Chapter 2 and the upcoming John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, but the filmmaker revealed last month that he’s still on board the remake, and now he’s been discussing his ambitions for the project during an interview with Collider.
“Highlander is an interesting property,” states Stahelski. “It’s through Lionsgate as well and Neal Moritz. We’re trying to get it done. Anyone who knows anything about the property knows it has a lot of meat to it. It’s a good property. It’s got a lot of potential. We’re just trying to figure out the best way not to fuck it up. Not to try and fit it into a 1 hour, 45 minute movie, which, when your pitch is, ‘There can be only one,’ and in your first movie you kill everybody but the one, sequels have a problem of happening.”
“So we’re trying to design in a way that gives us a little more lead in, a little more time with the mythology and see some of the best characters,” he continued. “They did seven seasons of TV, and even though the TV show may not hold up today, the idea of it and the characters they brought in were super cool. So we’re trying to devise a methodology that leads up to The Quickening. We’re well past the script phase in terms of what we want to accomplish with a feature-length version of what we want and based on there being more after that. We want to tell the complete story of The Quickening, the Immortals, and all that. But the overall environment is changing so much. Look what Netflix is doing with TV now… So there’s a couple different mediums we want to explore and what is the best way to bring this out in.”
Stahelski had previously suggested that his plans for the franchise could span a trilogy of movies, but this is the first time that we’ve heard it could also extend to the small screen. As it happens, that’s also something that Stahelski is working on for the John Wick franchise, with a TV spinoff entitled The Continental in the works at Starz.
Are you excited about the prospect of Stahelski taking on the Highlander franchise? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or on social media…
