Henry Cavill’s ‘Highlander’ reboot is back on the cards

When the first Highlander film dropped in 1986, fans fell in love with the quirky British-American action film starring Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, an immortal Scottish man born in the 16th century. Now living as an antique dealer in 1980s New York, MacLeod must face his sworn enemy as part of an ongoing immortal war.

Ridiculous, violent and camp; the Highlander franchise totalled five films, two TV series, an anime film, a flash-animated series, books, comics and much more.

However, the franchise went dark after the 2007 TV-movie Highlander: The Source. Since 2008, there have been discussions about rebooting the franchise with a remake of the original reportedly in the works.

The one and only

In 2016, John Wick director Chad Stalheski was attached to the project, with Superman-actor Henry Cavill in talks to star from at least 2021.

Now, Stalheski seems to have confirmed that the film is actually on the way, after 15 years of development. Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the director said: “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,” Stalheski added.

“Highlander, I can tell you right now… if we got our shit together and we pull off the feature, we have ideas for days about how to make the coolest characters and to make that an epic TV show,” the director said. “I just think that’s a rich, rich, rich, rich mythology. When you can pick any period in time, any nationality, any culture, any type of person and make them an immortal, then have to duel and deal with the burden of immortality, that’s fucking cool to me.”

Cavill has said before how excited he is about the project, particularly after his recent run of bad luck finding him out of his Superman and Witcher roles. “Deep diving into franchise storytelling with all the tools at our disposal, is going to make this an adventure I (and hopefully all of you) shall never forget. And as you can see from the swipe, I’ve lately been dipping into some of my Scottish heritage, and inadvertently getting my baseline research underway!” Cavill has said.