Director Chad Stahelski has been doing wonders for the action film community with a quadrilogy of superb films with the “John Wick” franchise starring Canadian action star Keanu Reeves. He’s coming off the massive success of “John Wick: Chapter 4” not only making coins at the box office but also being hailed as a great action film by audiences and critics alike. However, that’s not the only project brewing over at Lionsgate with the filmmaker.

While speaking with Josh Horowitz on his podcast, Happy Sad Confused (See below) he reveals that his long-in-development reboot of the “Highlander” franchise is not only still in the works at Lionsgate but actor Henry Cavill (“Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” “The Witcher”) is indeed still attached for an unnamed role in the sci-fi adventure pic.

“I think we have some very good elements now. The trick is when you have the tagline ‘there can only be one’, you can’t just kill everybody the first time. I’ll say it for you first, our story engages a lot of the same characters and stuff like that, but we’ve also brought in elements of all the TV shows, and we’re trying to do a bit of a prequel, a setup to The Gathering, so we have room to grow the property.”

If you’re not familiar with the “Highlander” films or shows, it focuses on a group of immortals that seek each other out to fight for “the prize” (being granted morality to live a regular life) and others are less interested in that by killing as many fellow immortals as they can to boost their powers/abilities with each encounter with The Quickening. When the power of a killed immortal is applied to another immortal via lightning strikes, making them more powerful and lengthening their immortality.

The director has previously talked up the idea of combining the film and television mythology, which they have done with the latter sequels. Taking a crack at focusing on world-building and then going into The Gathering, where immortals are steered towards each other to battle to the death until one. The main crux of the franchise line is: “There can be only one.” A troublesome aspect of the first film is that it ends with Connor winning the prize and leading to bizarre aspects to bring back other immortals from the past or other planets for subsequent sequels sort of shooting themselves in the foot isn’t something that Stahelski is interested in here with his incarnation.

Cavill, for his part, had recently exited the Netflix fantasy series “The Witcher” where you guessed it, he swung a sword for multiple seasons. It’s still unclear if Cavill would play hero or mentor in the reboot, but it’s starting to sound like we could be seeing both Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert’s role) and Duncan MacLeod (the main character from the first television series) in this reboot. Tapping into the duo of the “Scottish” cousins could be a good way to move past the alien stuff that was introduced in “Highlander II: The Quickening” and try to focus more on immortals simply happening among the human population, not to mention their human observers, The Watchers.

Sadly, this isn’t the only film in the works for Stahelski as he is also looking to make a live-action film at Sony Pictures based on the hit samurai video game “Ghost of Tsushima,” a sequel in the John Clark franchise with “Rainbow Six” starring Michael B. Jordan in the follow-up to “Without Remorse,” a Netflix feature film based on the pulp novels “Black Samurai,” an urban fantasy film called “Arcana” from the writers of “Predators,” and is hypothetically open to the idea of returning for “John Wick 5” if they come up with the right idea for it.

We’ll have to continue to be patient about future updates concerning “Highlander.”

SOURCE: HAPPY SAD CONFUSED PODCAST