From cinemablend, Things just keep looking worse for Live Free or Die Hard. First we had the news that this will be the first Die Hard movie which won’t be hard. They’re rating it PG-13, which means John McClane can’t even use his traditional, profanity-laced catchphrase. That’s pretty bad, but to me this is almost worse: 20th Century Fox doesn’t want Bruce Willis to mention any of the previous Die Hard movies when talking about this one. They want to pretend none of the other Die Hard movies even exist.Apparently Bruce Willis was in Dallas doing junket interviews to promote Live Free or Die Hard this week. I say apparently, because I’m only hearing about it secondhand. Yeah, we’re based in Dallas but we’re a lousy internet site and not worthy to be in the Bruce’s presence. I can’t blame them. In fact, I agree with them. We’re not worthy. But I heard whispers from a couple people who were going that there seemed to be a lot of unusual red tape. This morning that was confirmed this by The Jagger Show, a local radio program here in Dallas. In their morning broadcast they broke the news that before being allowed to talk to Bruce, they were ordered not to mention any of his old McClane movies. In their words, Fox reps told them “they don’t want any reference to the previous Die Hard films”.
This really blows my mind. How can Bruce Willis possibly promote a new Die Hard movie without mentioning that other movies existed before it? Wouldn’t you want to do that to remind existing fans of how much they love these movies and need to see this one? Or is Fox afraid that the PG-13 teenager crowd they covet so desperately won’t be interested if they find out that Live Free or Die Hard is part of something older than they are? During their broadcast, The Jagger Show crew indicated that the impression they got from Fox’s representatives is that the studio feels like they’re taking a page from Batman Begins and starting the Die Hard franchise over. Um, a couple of questions for Fox: Have you hired someone new to play John McClane? Is this a prequel which picks up McClane’s story before we first met him? No? Then you haven’t started over, you’re just pretending all the time we invested in this character didn’t happen in order to pander to a PG-13 teenager crowd who doesn’t care about your new Die Cushy movie anyway.
1 comment:
Let's not forget the real issue: can we somehow blame George Lucas for this? Obviously Fox was inspired by his blunt refusal to acknowledge those obscure, half-assed Star Wars movies he made in the 70's.
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