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Ruby Gill Takes ‘Some Kind Of Control’ On Album Number Two: ‘I Wasn't Planning On Sharing A Lot Of This Music’

A 'Die Hard' Prequel Is In The Works, And People Aren't Happy About It

16 October 2015 | 3:06 pm | Mitch Knox

"End this franchise. Please"

You may have seen online today that director Len Wiseman has confirmed that he and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura are working on a sixth entry to the long-running, increasingly terrible, Die Hard series — and it's going to be a prequel.

Details are relatively scant so far, other than — as confirmed in a tweet fired off by Wiseman yesterday — the film will likely be titled Die Hard: Year One, and will follow a young, pre-Nakatomi-terror-attack John McClane as a budding street cop on the mean streets of late '70s New York, at least according to Deadline. To be honest, knowing that it's a prequel, the title and time period aren't entirely surprising, given the existence of an eight-issue, two-volume limited comic-book series of the same name and subject that was released back in 2009-10.

Even less surprising is the fact that, anecdotally at least, a lot of people seem pretty pissed about the announcement. Even the reported plan to bookend the film with opening and closing scenes featuring series star Bruce Willis isn't much cause for celebration these days given what the franchise has done to the character of John McClane.

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John McTiernan's beloved 1988 original has long been considered a paragon of the action genre; a bar-setting icon of a movie that expertly enmeshed the storytelling tropes of "ordinary person does extraordinary thing" and "wrong place, wrong time, right guy" with equal parts brutality and humour. It was smart, tightly paced, brazen and fun. It was everything an action movie should be.

Die Hard elevated Willis — previously a totally unproven action star, having cut his teeth in comedy series Moonlighting — to the upper echelons of Hollywood heights, and yielded two sequels that still at least marginally resembled the original in 1990's Die Hard 2: Die Harder and 1995's Die Hard With A Vengeance.

Then came the 21st century and two further sequels, Live Free Or Die Hard and A Good Day To Die Hard, released in years not worth remembering, both of which were pretty much universally maligned for being (barely) serviceable action movies but absolutely pathetic attempts at recapturing anything close to the plucky spirit of the original Die Hard (or the original trilogy, if we're being generous).

Where McClane previously was a desperate man doing desperate things to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds (even, to an extent, in ...With A Vengeance, despite that film actually not starting out as a Die Hard story), Die Hards 4 and 5 reduced the character to indestructible murder-bot, doing ridiculous things like shooting himself through his own shoulder bullet hole to take down his man, or going on a fairly gratuitous Russian-terrorist killing spree in Moscow with his grown son.

The introduction of a sixth film into the series cannot bode well regardless of where it falls in McClane's timeline — another sequel would only serve to continue taking the ageing cop towards the ultimate point of being completely unaffected by bullets or explosives, while Deadline says this prequel promises to show "how [McClane] became a 'die hard' kind of guy", which is an absolutely idiotic thing to say because, as several folks on Twitter have pointed out, we already have that movie, and it was released in 1988.

Take it away, internet:

To be totally fair to Wiseman and co., though, at least two people out there have found the potential upside in all of this. We think.

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