Chad Stahelski compares John Wick and his Highlander series

There can be only one…even if it takes forever to get to the screen. Chad Stahelski may be on the waning end of the promotional circuit for John Wick 4, but there’s no dodging questions to his long-gestating Highlander remake.

In a recent interview with Deadline, Chad Stahelski discussed some of the plans for Highlander, which he has been working on in one capacity or another since 2017. He even compared the hopeful scope of Highlander to the expansive franchise mythology of the John Wick series. “I’ve worked on Highlander for years now, for Henry Cavill. Being retroactive is hard. What’s different between Wick and that? With Wick, you weren’t serving seven seasons of TV plus two spinoffs plus five films.”

Chad Stahelski also built on just why Highlander would work best in the television format, considering so much could occur. “If I were to do a remake of Highlander right now, you’d expect a lot of mythology in those first two hours, you couldn’t explore stuff without it. Now, Highlander as a TV show now would be amazing. You’d have time to build it out, see all those flashbacks and the potential of it. It’s trickier when you’re trying to do something with that big of a mythology…That would be one to take a really big stab at. Here, we just had the opportunity to really learn as we went on with Wick.”

Highlander has barely left Chad Stahelski’s mind. Even as busy as he’s gotten with the John Wick franchise–having directed all four–he has been talking about it frequently enough to let fans know that it’s still developing, even if he’s had other major projects going on. Last year, the director said of the progress, “We’re in the process of tweaking right now. I think we know what we want. More importantly than anything, we know what we want to make. It’s in the creatives. We know what we’re trying to make. It’s just a matter of getting it to the point where we feel, ‘Okay, this is it. Let’s go.’ But we’re closer than we’ve ever been, so that’s good.” Hopefully he is much closer than he was last August.

Are you hopeful that Chad Stahelski will get his Highlander remake into production soon? What do you hope to see in it?