I have a lot of love for the original Highlander movie, it might not have aged well, but it's still a hugely enjoyable romp. My hopes that a worthy remake could be made climbed to unimaginable heights last year when John Wick director Chad Stahelski was drafted in to helm the reboot. 

Highlander starred Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod (aka The Highlander), a 16th-century warrior that discovers he's immortal after he's struck down in combat. Trained by a fellow immortal (Sean Connery), Connor must prepare for battle with the ruthless Victor Kruger (Clancy Brown) to claim the ultimate prize. 

Summit and Lionsgate are behind the reboot, and in a recent interview with Collider, Chad Stahelski has revealed that the new Highlander is the first part of a planned trilogy.

“We’re currently doing a bit of work on the overall plot structure. When I came on board, they were trying to reinvent the single Highlander property. We’ve gone since back in, and we would like to really expand the world, so we consider the same shortcomings don’t happen again that happened on the original project, meaning you have one great movie and four questionable followups. We want to develop a property that can give us — and again it’s not about marketing, it’s not so much about the financials, it’s about how can we make a more mythological, chapter one, chapter two, what's a great way to tell this story?"

Stahelski also spoke at length that the Highlander TV series and the short-lived animated spin-off The Raven have proved to be an invaluable source of inspiration.

"I think the TV series hit on a lot of great stuff wasn’t in the feature, between the watchers and all the different types of immortals. How do we get this into a feature mode before we dribble it into the TV world? Well, let’s restructure it in parts, let’s look at it like it was a TV show, let’s look at it like it was a high-end trilogy. How to we tell the story of the gathering the quickenings, the immortals and how do we really build this world out even more so than the original project. That’s what we’re restructuring right now. It’s taking all the good stuff that we had before I was involved in the project from the script; redeveloping the script to give us really good chapters one, two and three; and expanding the world."

Trilogies are standard practice now with every major studio vying for the next big franchise, the world of Highlander is certainly rich enough to merit a trilogy, but the four sequels that followed the first film completely muddled the timeline. One element of the original Highlander that Stahelski wants to retain is the legendary soundtrack from music icons Queen, with a modern twist.

“We had a great composer on John Wick 1 and 2, Tyler Bates, who we think is one of the best in the business especially for meta-reality — Guardians of the Galaxy, 300, John Wick. I’ve already talked extensively with him about how can we take the magic of what Freddie Mercury and Queen gave us and how can we transpose that to modern day and give us that edge?”

If it were down to me, I would just reuse the original tracks as sung by Freddy Mercury as they sound as good today as they did all those years ago, but that's unlikely to happen. While there's no potential release date set, the hunt for a new Connor MacLeod is officially on.