Die Hard prequel killed hard by Disney
Die Hard producers say that the Godfather 2-style prequel isn’t happening
Film News die hard
Die Hard fans looking forward to diving deeper into the marital problems between John McClane and Holly Gennero might want to sit down. We’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ll never have to hear someone say, “The Die Hard prequel is a Christmas movie.” The bad news is we’re not getting a new Die Hard movie any time soon.
The Die Hard prequel, tentatively titled McClane, is dead… hard. Following the dismal box office returns on 2013's A Good Day To Die Hard, producers announced a prequel/reboot to the series. Well, the story of how Gennero ended up in Los Angeles will go untold, according to producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
“Yeah, no, it’s not happening,” di Bonaventura said. “But what was really interesting was we actually came up with an idea to do it. It was a project that wasn’t Die Hard that then, eventually, shifted over to Die Hard.”
Refashioning a script to fit the Die Hard mold is a long-running tradition in the series. For example, Die Hard 2 was initially based on the book 58 Minutes, which had no ties to McClane. And, Die Hard With A Vengeance was almost a Lethal Weapon sequel before screenwriters slotted in Bruce Willis’ character.
Honestly, the idea behind the prequel is kind of interesting—or, at least, something a little different. The movie, which was to be directed by series veteran Len Wiseman (Live Free Or Die Hard, Underworld), would be a Godfather Part 2-style joint narrative featuring young McClane and old McClane. “What was interesting about our idea was it allowed you the ability to meet the young John McClane and use Bruce,” said di Bonaventura. “So it was really interesting in that way. So you sort of got to see both versions of him.”
As for the future of Die Hard, that’s up to Disney, who is currently diving into a pool of intellectual property, like a content-rich Scrooge McDuck. Nevertheless, di Bonaventura says that he doesn’t know what their plans for the franchise are. But it does seem like Disney is at least toying with the idea of taking some of their hyper-violent properties (isn’t it great referring to movies as property?) out of the Disney vault, such as the recently announced Noah Hawley Alien series.
For the time being, though, it looks like Die Hard will have to live on in the form of kitschy ugly Christmas sweaters.
[via Polygon]
95 Comments
The first Die Hard movie was also a repurposed idea: it was based on the Roderick Thorp novel Nothing Lasts Forever, which was a sequel to his novel The Detective, which was made into a movie of the same name starring Frank Sinatra.
…and a clause in Sinatra’s contract required the producers to ask Frank if he wanted to star in any sequel and let him say yes or no before they could offer it to anyone else.
Sinatra was 73 years old when Die Hard came out. But I bet you they still would have cast Bonnie Bedelia as his wife.
In the “Nothing Last Forever” book, McLane (named Leland in the book) is actually closer to 73 years old than Willis’ age in 1988. He’s a retired police officer, and he’s in LA to visit his daughter, not his wife.
“they still would have cast Bonnie Bedelia as his wife.”They would have cast Marisa Tomei.
“Dooby-dooby-doo, motherfucker!”
I audibly laughed at this. Thank you.
“Now I have a machine gun, bada-zing!”
I thought that was Tom Holland for a second , I mean he wouldn’t be the worst in a prequel.
Bring the fake nose out of storage and cast Joseph Gordon Levitt.
While that would have been crazy, I can totally see Sinatra delivering the line, “Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs”, albeit in a very different way.
I mean , pretty much all DH movies are repurposed ideas.
“The first Die Hard movie was also a repurposed idea: it was based on the Roderick Thorp novel Nothing Lasts Forever, which was a sequel to his novel The Detective, which was made into a movie of the same name starring”, you guessed it, Frank Stallone.
More like “McLAME”, AMIRITE?!?
I was looking forward to the title: “Die Semi-Hard”.
The good news is we’ll never have to hear someone say, “The .” The bad news is we’re not getting a new Die Hard movie any time soon.I’m sorry, what’s the bad news again?
Right? How is it bad news that we won’t get another entry in a series whose last good entry was 26 years ago?
Live Free or Die Hard is decent, I’d even go so far as to call the R-Rated Cut good.The fifth one was a travesty.
It’s bad news for LA’s coke dealers. That’s months of late-night script writing sessions they’ve just lost out on.
Yeah, I literally pumped my fist and said ‘thank fuck’ when I read this.
The bad news is that this idea hasn’t yet been staked through the heart and buried at a cross-roads, so it will eventually rise again.
So Willis will have to go back to delivering listless cameos in straight-to-disc shit? Good.
How do film executives continually fail to understand the appeal of Die Hard?He’s a regular joe cop in a regular joe body who uses his wits and moxie to defeat a team of roided out heavily armed terrorists. Period. Subsequent sequels have him facing off one-on-one against fighter jets. And a prequel series would presumably establish he was never a regular joe all along. That’s all… fine I guess, but it’s not the appeal of the original Die Hard (and to a lesser extent Die Hard II and III but definitely not IV or V).
Weirdly, this ended up being one of the primary reasons why the game “Dead Rising” was an unexpected success as well. There’s grist in the mill of a regular joe taking on irregular odds and not coming out of it 100% fine at the end. Funny how that gaming franchise, just like Die Hard, also forgot what made it special.
III gets closest to the McClane of Die Hard than any other Die Hard movie. Probably because he’s hungover and looks like shit throughout most of it.
I think you’re right though I think it’s for a different reason. Name the best thing about Die Hard. Quick. You know it. I know it. We all know it. McClane is a great character when written properly but the movie needs powerful antagonists and foils. Not many can hold a candle to Alan Rickman, but a Jeremy Irons/Sam Jackson double team comes closest.
Rickman’s “American” accent?
For a brief moment I actually thought he was Bill Clay!
Hans Gruber is german
Isn’t he supposed to be German in the movie?
He is, but there’s a fun scene where McClane (Willis) stumbles upon Gruber (Rickman) on the roof and you’re like “oh shit, Gruber is toast” and without missing a beat Gruber feigns an American accent that is simultaneously amazing/terrible and fools McClane into thinking he’s just another hostage…or does he…?
That’s right. Sorry.
He is. I should probably more accurately say it’s Gruber’s “American” accent, in the scene Brick is talking about.
“Oh Gawd, yaer one of them!”
Right. I forgot about that scene for a moment.
i can hear Jeremy Irons chuckle to that
Is there any other actor who is the Best Thing about more movies than Rickman? Die Hard, Robin Hood, every Harry Potter (arguably), Galaxy Quest.
Rickman elevated all the films he was in. I honestly can’t imagine how they are going to do a Galaxy Quest series/sequel without him. I’ll fully admit that the cast of that was pretty much lightening in a bottle (even Tim Allen, go figure), but without Rickman you’re just wasting time and money.
Hot take: Live Free is actually pretty fun and way, way better than II, which people only like because of its title.
I normally hate it when people use this formulation, but here it goes: Live Free is a solid action movie, but a terrible Die Hard movie.
I didn’t hate Live Free or Die Hard, but that was about as far from the original character as I was willing to accept.
I think part of the problem is also that I don’t think Bruce Willis gets the appeal of Die Hard and I would not be surprised if, if you handed him a script with a schlubby, down and out Jon McClane, he’d demand you make him more of a Capital B Badass before he agreed to do the movie
I misread your first sentence as Why do people like Die Hard , hence the mini essay below ….doh!Honestly , the first two movies * were well liked in their time , exciting , and more importantly ,since the odds are at least some of the people you watch it with have already seen them, shouting out quips /doing bad impressions/joking about what’s going to happen next is a fun activity.I know that’s some peoples idea of hell , but if not , welcome to the party pal!(Obviously there are more :*Number 3 :Die Hard with a Vengeance is actually a great movie by the way(in fact its the arguably the best DH movie of all), but not as well watched as the first two , and it loses out on the Christmas theme. Live free and Die hard aka Die Hard 4.0 is less good(Kevin Smith and Bruce Willis nearly came to blows filming it) but still watchable. Five , which I’ve never bothered remembering the name of is something about mcclaine and his son in Russia and is just ..shit, so I’d sub it out with a movie called 16 blocks which isn’t technically a DH movie , but since all of the Die Hard scripts started as separate movies that were then changed to fit , it works great .Just imagine McClaine was forced into witness protection and had to change his name , it makes a great ending to the series that way)
It’s a decent mini essay. Though I would have subbed “welcome to the party pal!” with “yippee kayee, motherfucker!”;)
I’d have subbed with “I guess he won’t be making that hat convention in July!”, which is from a completely different, non-‘Die Hard’ movie and makes no sense in this context, but remains one of my favourite Bruce Willis line readings.
Kevin Smith and Bruce Willis came to blows filming Cop Out. They got along great in Live Free, which is why Willis did Cop Out to begin with.
It was particularly great after the 80s had been feeding us a steady diet of unstoppable, near-inhuman action heroes played by your Stallones and Schwarzeneggers, who never seemed to break a sweat as they mowed down armies of bad guys. John McClane bled and suffered as he got knocked around like a playful mastiff’s chew toy, but he could hit back because he was sneaky and bull-headed and fought dirty. ‘Die Hard’ really did change the action movie landscape.
And Willis wasn’t that far removed from “David Addison” in the public consciousness.
Live Free or Die Hard wasn’t a particularly good Die Hard movie, but A Good Day to Die Hard was downright depressing. There were no redeeming qualities to that film. It’s kind of sad that the franchise is likely going to end there. But we did get three surprisingly great films out of Die Hard. To this day, I still think that the second and third film are a bit underrated just because they’re in the shadow of a bona fide cinematic classic.
Which one was the one where Timothy Olyphant had to take the role to pay the mortgage on the house he bought right before Deadwood was canceled?
Live Free or Die Hard
Hitman was a passion project, though.
I’m sure working on ‘Deadwood’ provided Olyphant with the vocabulary he needed for such a misfortune.
I like to think of “16 Blocks” as a lost DH movie , and a better ending than A Good Day to Die Hard .Just imagine theres a bit of text at the start that McClaine was forced into a witness protection scheme where he had to change his name before the start . And then watch as grizzled cop John Mccl..I mean Jack Mosley (he kept the initials ) escorts witness(Mos Def) to testify , while keeping them both alive over the titular distance to the courthouse.
This just makes me hopeful that my proposed crossover starring Whoopi Goldberg and Bruce Willis reprising their most famous roles in Old Habits Die Hard might happen
A prequel could’ve explored so many interesting stories. Agents Johnson and Johnson meeting in fuckin’ Saigon, a kid telling his mother that he’s going to go outside to play with his toy ray gun, the younger Gruber brothers watching American TV with disdain…
I like it, except Agent Johnson was in junior high while Agent Johnson was in Saigon.
…dickhead
Agent Johnson goes to career day at his kid’s school to talk about his military career that he’s transitioning to law enforcement, and one of his kid’s classmates is the future Agent Johnson (no relation).
Maybe he was on a class trip?
No, the other one
It would have been a Len Weisman movie, so things like logic, continuity and laws of physics wouldn’t have mattered.
Al Powell’s first Twinkie
And how about the guy on the plane who told McClane to make fists with his feet? What’s his story?
I first read “Gruber brothers” as “MacGruber brothers, and I have to say I was intrigued.
Gruber reading about the Asian Dawn Movement in Time.
I want to see how Argyle decided to become a limo driver.
joint narrative featuring young McClane and old McClaneSo Looper then?
As long McClane isn’t drawing diagrams about time travel, I think the prequel could have worked.
I have a kind of perverse love for the trope, and Die Hard certainly didn’t invent it, that the hero is really just trying to get his wife to love him again. And it’s not he has to change to achieve that, he just has to lean even harder into the stuff that drove her nuts in the first place. It’s her that has to change, and admit that he was right all along. It’s so sad, in a way. Pretty much everything John Wayne made after about 1960 is another example, with the added fun that his wife is really America.
To be fair, the entire movie was Bruce Willis’ flight from NYC to LA, so…
how can av club be so snarky all the time but NOT be snarky about how bad len wiseman’s die hard movies and just call him ‘series veteran’.
how can av club be so snarky all the time but NOT be snarky about how bad len wiseman’s die hard movies
fixed it
Die Hard With A Vengeance was almost a Lethal Weapon sequel before screenwriters slotted in Bruce Willis’ character.Now I want to see a Lethal Weapon sequel where Riggs and Murtaugh have to run all over L.A. following a mad bomber’s clues. Probably would have been better than Lethal Weapon 4.
You mean you didn’t think the ‘flied rice’ scene wasn’t award winning cinema?
Honestly, I don’t remember it. But that’s the thing — Lethal Weapon one through three I can at least remember a few things. I can’t remember a damn thing about four other than Chris Rock was in it and it had something to do with the Triad gang? I can’t even remember Jet Li.
And the reason Die Hard 3 did that was because Speed 2 was supposed to be a Die Hard.
I don’t know if that’s true or just snark, but either way, I’ll upvote it
Well here’s my pitch for a Die Hard sequel that nobody asked for. It’s not mind blowing or anything, basically it’s the first movie but this time the hero is retired Sergeant Powell’s son who is a divorced father working as a security guard in a high rise hotel after resigning from the police force. He has just been diagnosed for ADHD which explains his failed marriage and he fears that his 10 year old son have it too. After showing up late to pick his son up a day before Christmas, he remembers that he had to cover his friend’s shift that night. So he had to take his son back with him to the hotel and thanks to a coworker who likes him his son is allowed to take a tour of the hotel and enjoy the festivities taken place there. Then a group of armed Santas come in and take the building hostage, one of their demands is the delivery of one John McClane alive so they can kill him and broadcast it in public. Now this older McClane is on a wheelchair and in no shape or form to be a badass. The younger Powell now need to wage a one man war against the terrorists to save his son with the help of a familiar voice on the phone, McClane himself. I was thinking Michael B. Jordan as the lead.
Yes. I want that movie.
No, get Jaleel White
*EXPLOSIONS
“Whoops, did I do that?”
I am blown away this ever made it past the “funny laugh we all shared and promptly forgot about over afternoon drinks” phase. Who was the person that truly believed Die Hard fans are so rabid that they are going to want to watch a story about John and Holly’s crumbling marriage that ends in her going to LA.? I posted on some other post about the weird way studios decide to milk franchises and sometimes I think these things are jokes that someone misses and reports as actual news.
I’m going to guess it was an exec who grew up with Ellis from the first movie as a role model and believed he was the actual hero of the piece.
This isn’t a criticism, but I looked up A Good Day To Die Hard, and its “dismal” return was 302,000,000 worldwide on a listed 92,000,000 budget. I know it was probably a crummy movie and I know profits are considered good or bad in comparison as a whole. But that’s 200 million dollars in the bank. Even minus advertising, seems not dismal to me. I guess dismal is the stateside loss (60 something million over here).
Or… Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Felton play young Hans and Simon Gruber. Make it so.
I think it’s good that we aren’t getting another lazy Die Hard movie. I’d be fine with one more. Start the film one week before he retires. The villain, inspired by all his past heroism, wants to test him, similar to DH3 to see if he’s still got it.
The bad news is we’re not getting a new Die Hard movie any time soon.Sounds like good news to me.
Good.A prequel was a stupid fucking idea.
The description makes it sound like it’s a sequel with an extended flashback and goes back and forth between the two. Which isn’t as terrible as a straight prequel.
And people said nothing good would come from Fox selling to Disney (because that’s what it was, not some sort of hostile takeover. It was Disney or Comcast, pick your poison on that one).
“How can the same shit happen to the same guy before the other shit and somehow never be mentioned previously?”
If you squint hard enough, the podium with Willis behind it looks like a lit Zippo.
A prequel is completely unnecessary (although I’ve long held the belief that it doesn’t really matter if a new movie in an existing franchise gets made. We can all ignore it if it’s bad). Die Had 1 was a fantastic 80’s action movie with a great cast. 2 and 3 are pretty boring. The 2007 one was completely unnecessary, but actually a pretty fun action movie IMO. I think I saw the 2013 one but can remember literally nothing about it. It was in Russia I think? But Die Hard wasn’t good cause of the plot, not really. They were good because of the actors and the dialogue. You don’t need to set a story in the Die Hard universe to get this stuff.
John “Nakatomi Plaza” McClane, previously known as John “insert sequel’s crisis name here” McClane.