What Does a Possible ‘Lethal Weapon 5’ Mean for the FOX Series?

The Lethal Weapon TV series has done well for Fox these last two years. Its ratings were high enough to take it from thirteen episodes to a full season order, then a second season — though there’s still no word on whether or not we’re getting a third.

Yet so far, Lethal Weapon has fared much better amongst casual viewers than TV critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the audience gave season 1 a 91-percent, then bumped season 2 up to 95-percent. The critics weren’t so kind. The “TomatoMeter” sits at 65-percent for season 1, and apparently critics didn’t even find season 2 worth reviewing.

There’s one clear conclusion that Fox may be drawing from this data: maybe the audience for Lethal Weapon is made up mostly of fans of the original movies.

If that’s the case, then the recent rumblings of a Lethal Weapon 5 film in the works at Warner Bros. could spell bad news for this burgeoning buddy cop series.

It’s possible — pessimistic, but possible — that the reasonable success of the Lethal Weapon series served only to remind Fox of what it had with this property. Now that they know there’s a large and active audience waiting for more adventures from Murtaugh and Riggs, they could have decided to make the more obvious choice of producing another film for the franchise.

A fifth installment of Lethal Weapon has been in the rumor mill since long before the series came out. Shane Black, who write the first movie, even co-wrote a treatment for Lethal Weapon 5 that never got produced.

Big fans of the franchise can only hope that the series gets renewed for a third season and the fifth movie gets produced. Either way, it looks like the unlikely duo is not done yet.