By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
Bruce Willis just won't die — again.
The 51-year-old actor has signed on to a fourth Die Hard movie, 20th Century Fox said Wednesday, returning him to the wisecracking tough-guy character that made him an action star 18 years ago.
The film, titled Live Free or Die Hard, features his John McClane police officer attempting to stop a techno-terrorist from shutting down the nation's computer systems on the Fourth of July. The story takes place around Washington, D.C., and will be directed by Underworld: Evolution filmmaker Len Wiseman.
Willis is the latest leading man to revisit one of his iconic action characters years later. Sylvester Stallone is reprising his boxer for a new sequel Rocky Balboa, and Harrison Ford has been in negotiations for years to make a fourth Indiana Jones movie.
Die Hard has been a lucrative franchise. The first three movies took in $739 million worldwide, and that's not counting DVD sales.
The new Die Hard will be released next June 29, just before the July Fourth holiday.
Wiseman says the character, known for expletive-punctuated battle cry "Yippee-Kai-Yay ...!," will be "doing what he does best, being a huge pain" to the bad guys.
"Our villain is high tech, but the way McClane deals with him is low-tech," Wiseman says. "A fistfight still solves a lot of problems."
Wiseman, known for his icy style and special-effects skills, faces a challenge in resurrecting the franchise with new flair. In the years since the first Die Hard in 1988, many action films have imitated the template of a lone hero who takes out a team of villains all by himself.
"It became a pitching format in Hollywood," Wiseman says, with writers or producers routinely describing their story in shorthand as Die Hard on a bus or Die Hard on a submarine "It got to the point where, 10 years later, Bruce was talking to some writers and it came back to him full circle. They said, 'What we've got is Die Hard in a building. A really tall building.' He said, Umm ... OK."
That's because in the original movie, McClane fought a group of heavily armed thieves in a Los Angeles skyscraper.
In the second movie, 1990's Die Hard 2: Die Harder, he battled terrorists at a snowed-in airport. He fought a mad bomber in 1995's Die Hard with a Vengeance, with Samuel L. Jackson in the sidekick role as an angry New York shopkeeper.
Wiseman says the fourth outing "will be a more epic movie. It's on a much grander scale. The threat is nationwide."
He said none of the characters from the earlier movies were returning, and no other cast members were being announced yet.
3 comments:
Not to get all political but this irritates me, because right-winger Willis obviously buys into the Bush-era paranoid fantasy that a bazillion terrorists are fiendishly trying to attack our infrastructure all the time and "the heroes" are the only thing that stand between us citizens and certain death. I liked it better when he was fighting "fake" terrorists (as he was the other three times).
...throw in kate beckinsale and i am there....
I can't say this whole "techno-terrorist" thing sounds very exciting. So what if he turns off the computers on the 4th of July? Everybody's out eating hot dogs.
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