Highlander is the latest franchise to be reborn in the present, and the talent behind the new movie makes it very exciting. Director Chad Stahelski of John Wick fame has the helm of the reboot, with Henry Cavill playing the titular Highlander. Highlander is a relic of the 1980s, full of all the fashions of that decade, sartorially and otherwise. While there are some fans who think that the movie should stay back then, others would like something a little different. In an interview with The Direct, Stahelski revealed not only the time period the movie would take place in – the present day – but also how he talked Cavill into playing the role.
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Stahelski said, “We’re bringing it forward from the early 1500s in the Highlands to the beyond present-day New York and Hong Kong, and seeing how it goes. There’s big opportunity for action. There’s a chance to play a character that not a lot of people get to play. And it’s a bit of a love story, but not how you think. On John Wick, I learned a lot on how to bend the storytelling a little.”
He then talked about getting Cavill involved with the film, saying, “My selling point was, to [Cavill], look, you’ve got a guy that’s been alive for over 500 years. He’s the last person in the world that wanted to be in this situation. So you get to cover quite a broad spread of a character arc there. And you get to experience someone that’s trained over 500 years and sort of played [with many types of] martial arts.”
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As great as it would be to get a remake of the Highlander in the 1980s, setting it in the present day is so much better. The gap of culture and technology between today and the decade of excess is basically night and day. It will be much more interesting to see how Conor MacLeod deals with the world of social media and the changing mores of society instead of doing a more faithful remake. Highlander is one of those franchises that has dormant for years – the last film was 2007’s Highlander: The Source, which starred characters from the ’90s TV spin-off – and has been mostly forgotten by fans and pop culture. Fans of the movies have already experienced worse than changing when the movie takes place – Highlander II: The Quickening‘s alien origins for the Immortals and the return of Sean Connery’s Juan Sanchez-Villalobos Ramirez immediately spring to mind. This will make for a much more interesting film.
Highlander will begin filming in early 2025.