Don’t Expext That ‘Die Hard’ Prequel, Disney Axes The Film

The long-in-development Die Hard prequel, McClane from the now Disney-owned 20th Century Studios will not be moving forward. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura confirmed the good news to Polygon, while promoting his newest movie Snake Eyes.

“Yeah, no, It’s not happening,” di Bonaventura said. The prequel was actually gaining quite a bit of steam, with a script completed. That all came to a halt in 2019, when Disney acquired Fox in the mega-merger. di Bonaventura isn’t sure if Disney has any plans for the franchise moving forward, “I don’t know what their plans are.”

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Released in 1988, and starring Bruce Willis, Die Hard follows NYPD cop John McClane (Willis) goes on a Christmas vacation to visit his wife Holly in Los Angeles where she works for the Nakatomi Corporation. While they are at the Nakatomi headquarters for a Christmas party, a group of robbers led by Hans Gruber take control of the building and hold everyone hostage, with the exception of John, while they plan to perform a lucrative heist. Unable to escape and with no immediate police response, John is forced to take matters into his own hands.

This film was a box office smash hit grossing $140 million worldwide and is hailed as not only one of the best action movies of all-time, but one of the best Christmas movies of all-time.

The success of Die Hard spawned four film sequels, beginning with Die Hard 2 in 1990, which was rushed into production to capitalize on the original’s popularity, the film would gross much more than it’s predecessor with $239 million. Five years later, Samuel L. Jackson joined Willis for the third film Die Hard With a Vengeance, and again it was a box office hit grossing $360 million. Live Free or Die Hard, also known as Die Hard 4.0, was released in 2007. The film was controversial for its studio-mandate to target younger audiences, requiring much of the violence and profanity prevalent in the rest of the series to be excluded. Even so, it was financially and critically successful. The fifth film in the series, A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), was also considered a financial success. That said, It was destroyed by critics and fans, and the negative reception stalled the franchise.

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