The long-mooted plan to reboot Highlander, with John Wick director Chad Stahelski, is finally pressing ahead early in 2025.
There seems to have been attempts to get a reboot/remake/reimagining (choose your preferred term) of Highlander going on for so long now that you’d have to be one of the original film’s immortal characters to remember when things first got underway.
Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s been over a decade at this point since Ryan Reynolds was in place for a Highlander remake, with the Deadpool star set to play Connor MacLeod, the titular Highlander who discovers that he’s actually part of a race of immortals who vie for supremacy by engaging in sword duels.
The time-hopping premise of the film offers so much storytelling potential and the original also boasts some great performances from stars Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery and Clancy Brown, the latter two seemingly having a riot of a time.
If the original Highlander has aged poorly in any respect, it’s that the sword fights pale can seem a little quant when compared to modern action cinema. But with John Wick's Chad Stahelski in the director’s chair, we can look forward to something special in that regard.
Stahelski has been talking a little about the style of sword combat we can expect to see in the new Highlander, as well as revealing that the film will begin shooting in January and that star Henry Cavill has spent much of this year preparing himself for the film’s physical scenes. Speaking to Collider, Stahelski used the John Wick films as an example of how he plans to make the swordplay in Highlander a combination of entertaining fantasy and grounded reality.
“I’ll keep it to the core,” he explains, before adding, “most audiences, I’ll use the gun analogy, most of what you know about gunfights or car chases, because most of us don’t get involved in gun fights, or car chases, or sword fights, we learn through movies. And what those movies show you is about 95% bulls(‘spit’ – Ed). You don’t fight 50 guys with your bare hands and then walk away, but it’s fun. It’s wish fulfillment.”
The filmmaker went on to discuss how his John Wick films developed the fantasy aspect of gunplay by adding in dashes of realism to create a style of action sequence that has influenced other filmmakers. Expect that in his new Highlander, too.
With shooting not happening until the beginning of next year, it will be a while before Highlander appears. Lionsgate is backing the project and Stahelski is set to fly to Scotland shortly to do his final location checks. We’ll bring you more on this one (which like the original will feature music by Queen in some capacity) as as we hear it.
