One way to ensure that the Die Hard franchise, seemingly dunzo after the lowly entry A Good Day To Die Hard, never really really does… ahem… die, is to take a Back to the Future-type approach to things in an attempt to breathe some life into the proceedings.
Such seems to be the plan in the case of Die Hard: Year One, which director Len Wiseman, who made 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard, discussed in a recent interview with Collider.
According to the director, the film will be something of a “prequel/sequel,” an origin story focused on how John McClane, Bruce Willis’s iconic character, came to be the wise-cracking, right place, wrong time hero audiences have come to know and love:
“We’ve never seen the actual love story. We know its demise, but we’ve never seen what it was like when he met Holly, or when he was a beat cop in ‘78 in New York when there was no chance of him making detective. It’s always been something I’ve been thinking about, and now we’re doing it. And it ties in.”
Wiseman went on to detail how Willis, now 60 years old, could possibly factor into a movie in which his character is ostensibly in his 20s (the movie will be set in 1979). This is where the idea of a “prequel/sequel” comes into play.
“It’s really working into the plot, with the ‘70s having ramifications on present-day Bruce,” he explained. “It inter-cuts in a very fun, imaginative way with present-day John McClane.”
Is this a good idea? Should the Die Hard franchise simply call it a day? Wouldn’t it be infinitely more entertaining to see 60-year old Willis playing a 20-something-year-old McClane? For the answers to those and other burning Die Hard-themed questions, stay tuned, probably sometime in 2017.
(via Collider)
