Chad Stahelski Gives Pretty Promising ‘Highlander’ Reboot Update; TV vs Film

John Wick 1-3 director Chad Stahelski really wants to reboot Highlander. We’ve known this since 2016, when news started to circulate that the stuntman-turned-director wanted to tackle the tale of the ultimate immortal.

Just this week, Stahelski offered an update on the project to our friends over at Collider, in which he confirms he’s still “fighting the good fight”:

“Still fighting the good fight. Highlander is an interesting property. 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. 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.

You just don’t end with a one-on-one battle in New York, cut off a guy’s head, and that’s it. We want to do this in such a way that it becomes more of a series whether it’s short form or long form that would let us explore that in the best way. I have a huge, heartfelt love and respect for the project, so we’re trying to find the best way to do it to give fans what they want.”

This…is actually really promising, and considering Stahelski’s prowess with pretty bitchin’ fight scenes, we can only dream of what he’d do adding lightning into the mix.

And, as to whether or not this Highlander project would work better as a film or tv series (just FYI, Amazon has ALL THE HIGHLANDER TV SERIES including The Raven), Stahelski said:

“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. As an action designer myself, there are two or three episodes of Game of Thrones that blow away 90% of features. Netflix has a whole new delivery system with features on that coming off differently and letting filmmakers and directors expand out without being crushed by opening weekend box office. So there’s a couple different mediums we want to explore and what is the best way to bring this out in.”

Perhaps the biggest question would be…who would do the score? Hard to live up to that Queen epic, right?

We’ll let you know what we hear about this possible Lionsgate project.

John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum is set to hit theaters on May 17th, 2019.