With the success of Fast Five earlier this year, Justin Lin has been fielding a lot of offers in the past few months. It seems almost inevitable that his schedule would become a bit overbooked and that appears to be the case as the Hollywood Reporter is breaking the news that the director has dropped out of the Highlander remake to which he was previously attached.
Lin first became involved with Summit Entertainment’s remake of the 1986 fantasy film about immortals battling their way through history to the modern ear to claim a vaguely defined but powerful “Prize” back in September 2009. However, Universal’s desire to have Lin get a sixth Fast And Furious film into theaters as quick as possible as well as studio pressure to start moving forward on a new Terminator film have lead to a scheduling conflict with Summit’s project.
Lin will stay on as an executive producer for the project.
Summit bought the rights to remake Highlander back in May 2008. Since then they’ve had Art Marcum and Matt Holloway work on the script. You can read our review of their January 21,2009 draft here.
Presumably if Summit is looking at getting this project in front of cameras as quickly as possible, I would expect news of a replacement director relatively soon.
