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WB is Remaking 'Lethal Weapon', 'Westworld' & 'The Wild Bunch'?

by Alex Billington
January 20, 2011
Source: THR, Deadline

"I'm getting too old for this shit." A whole bunch of remakes, yes more of them, in development at Warner Bros just made themselves known thanks to an exec leaving the company. THR reports that an executive VP at the studio named Jessica Goodman left and her projects that she was working will move to other execs. So what did she have? In addition to remakes of The Dirty Dozen, Oh God and Tarzan (some of which we have heard about before), other remakes she was working on were Lethal Weapon, Westworld and The Wild Bunch. Too many remakes, give it a rest! But that's not it, as some of them are in active development.

First up, if you remember, there was a Lethal Weapon 5 in development for a while, but with all the recent Mel Gibson madness, that fell apart before it could get too far. Deadline reports that instead, Joel Silver is producing and up-and-comer Will Beall ("Castle", Gangster Squad) is writing a take that will "relaunch the buddy cop series with a new cast." Beall is a former LA police officer who patrolled South Central and also wrote the novel L.A. Rex. Apparently this remake will at least be a "hard R-rated edgy street cop movie," which is great to hear, but it will still be a police procedural with a "mismatched pair of detectives" again.

The only other details THR mentions are in regards to the Westworld and The Wild Bunch and what they might do for a remake, but even that is speculative and it sounds like all we've got area names of the movies and that's it. Westworld is the 1973 sci-fi western "where robot men and women are programmed to serve you" that would be a fun update. The Wild Bunch is Sam Peckinpah's classic 1969 western, which shouldn't even be remade to begin with, but there's not much we can do about it. Are westerns really that popular now or is this just what was in the works with this specific exec? We'll let you know if we find that answer.

Filed under Movie News, Opinions, Rumors

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