The Highlander remake that keeps not happening
For more than fifteen years a new Highlander has been just around the corner, which is perhaps fitting for a story about people who never seem to die.
Few remakes have been announced as often as Highlander. Plans for a new version surfaced in the late 2000s, and since then the project has collected a long list of directors, writers and release windows. In the 2010s several filmmakers were attached in turn before moving on. Later, Chad Stahelski, the director behind the John Wick films, took it on, and Henry Cavill was announced as the lead. Even with those names, the film has kept slipping, with production pushed back more than once. As of this writing it remains a project people talk about rather than one they have seen.
Why it keeps stalling
Part of the problem is simply how studio development works: rights change hands, budgets are reworked and stars’ schedules fill up. But Highlander also poses particular difficulties.
- A messy legacy. The original was followed by sequels that contradicted it and each other, plus television spin-offs with their own continuity. Any new version has to decide what to keep and what to quietly forget.
- A premise built for a franchise. The idea of immortals fighting through the centuries until one remains naturally suggests a series. A remake designed to launch many films risks losing the focus that made the first one work.
- An original that is hard to copy. Highlander’s appeal is as much about its eccentric mood as its plot, and mood is the hardest thing to reproduce on purpose.
What made the 1986 original work
Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander was not an obvious success on release, and it found much of its audience on home video and television. What people discovered there was a film unlike most action movies of its decade. It cut between sixteenth-century Scotland and 1980s New York, gave its centuries-old hero, Connor MacLeod, a melancholy rather than a swagger, and treated immortality as a loss as much as a gift.
The casting helped enormously. Christopher Lambert played MacLeod with a wounded, slightly otherworldly air. Sean Connery, as the flamboyant Spanish-Egyptian swordsman Ramírez, seemed to be enjoying himself in every scene, and Clancy Brown’s Kurgan was a villain of real menace and mischief. Mulcahy, who came from music videos, gave the film fluid transitions between eras that still feel inventive.
Then there is the music. Queen’s songs for the film, including the elegiac Who Wants to Live Forever, gave the story an emotional register that a conventional score might not have reached. For many fans, the soundtrack is as much a part of Highlander as the swords.
The real challenge
Modern action cinema can certainly deliver better sword fights than a 1980s production could. Stahelski’s own work shows how much fight choreography has advanced. The harder question is whether a remake can capture the original’s sadness: the sense that living forever means watching everyone you love grow old. If the long-delayed new version ever arrives, that will be the test it has to pass.
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