Die Hard With A Vengeance Is One Of My Favorite Action Movies, And I Guess I Have Steven Seagal To Thank?
When it comes to the Die Hard franchise and the best '90s movies in general, Die Hard with a Vengeance will always be at the top of my list. Admittedly, this was the first John McClane movie I saw (it came on HBO when I was like seven years old), and so I've always had a soft spot for Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson teaming up to save the 'Big Apple.' The frenzied New York City setting, the cat-and-mouse game, the big twists, the ties to the franchise's early days. All of it is just perfect.
While I've known for years that this didn't start out as a Die Hard movie, I only recently learned that we saw this iconic version of it because of a classic Steven Seagal action flick. So, I guess I have the controversial actor-turned-musician-turned-sheriff to thank for it all. Here's why…
The 'Die Hard on a [insert location]' trend took off like wildfire soon after Bruce Willis first played John McClane back in the 1988 franchise starter, but the series almost tried that angle out itself in the early 1990s. Following the release of Die Hard 2: Die Harder, 20th Century Fox made plans for another sequel, which wasn't going to take place in New York City, but instead on a boat. Yes, we were close to having Die Hard on a Boat.
Back in late 1992, the Los Angeles Times reported that the threequel's original idea would have seen the grumpy, hungover, yet dependable detective attempt to save a yuppie cruise ship from a band of terrorists. In that report, it was also pointed out that this version was based on a spec script titled Troubleshooter, but more on that later. So, what ended up causing the studio to back off and pivot to what would become the 1995 blockbuster?
Though a script was adapted and fine-tuned for Die Hard 3, and it looked like things were going to pick up steam, the project was abandoned at some point in 1992 because of a little movie called Under Siege, starring none other than Steven Seagal.
In the same Los Angeles Times article mentioned above, the studio and film's producers decided that the similarly plotted movies – Under Siege centers on a U.S. Navy ship hijacked by terrorists – would have come out too close to one another and didn't want it to look like Willis was following in Seagal's footsteps. This also followed a trend of other movies that took a page out of Die Hard's book (Passenger 57 and Cliffhanger also came out in the months following Under Siege's success).
I totally see why Willis, Fox, and the Die Hard 3 producers wanted to take a different approach to the franchise after the success of Under Siege, as well as the trend of similarly-plotted action movies at the time. However, I'm not going to lie and say I wouldn't want to hear John McClane say his famous line while swinging from a cable connected to a ship's smokestack or while taking out a terrorist by swinging on an anchor or something.
John Milius, the man who wrote classics like Jeremiah Johnson, Apocalypse Now, and Magnum Force before directing quintessential '80s movies like Red Dawn and Conan the Barbarian, was tasked with working on Die Hard 3 after the original plans sank. I don't know about you, but the idea of Milius writing a John McClane story seems like a match made in action movie heaven, and it almost happened.
According to the same Los Angeles Times article, Milius, who told the paper, 'We're off the boat,' was approached to make a non-nautical Die Hard movie at some point in late 1992 with the idea that it would shoot in mid-1993 and come out during the 1994 summer blockbuster season. There were some massive movies in '94, and Die Hard 3 would have been right in the middle of it all. Imagine two Bruce Willis movies, two all-time great action flicks, and more in the same summer. Bonkers!
At some point, I can't really figure out when, Fox scrapped the Milius idea (I really want to know what this would have been about) and decided to just take an unproduced script that it owned, retool it, and make it into Vengeance. I've been aware that the movie started out as a thriller called Simon Says (that aspect remained in the finished product), I didn't know that it was originally supposed to be a Brandon Lee movie before the actor's tragic death on the set of The Crow.
According to Comic Book Resource, Simon Says was pitched after the success of 1992's Rapid Fire, with Lee taking on the role of NYPD officer Alex Bradshaw and the character that eventually became Samuel L. Jackson's Zeus Carver being a female instead. But those plans were scrapped when Lee died in a freak on-set accident in 1993, and the script was put back in the pile before being turned into Die Hard with a Vengeance.
Perhaps the craziest thing, however, I learned throughout all of this is that not only do I have Seagal to thank for Die Hard with a Vengeance, I also have him to thank for this absolutely insane Willem Dafoe death scene. Digging around, I discovered that the unused Die Hard 3 script from the early 1990s was later retooled and turned into Speed 2: Cruise Control. Though the story ended up being used for a random sequel to 1994's Speed (without Keanu Reeves) that is considered garbage by most, it still got to see the light of day.
When speaking with Movieline back in 2001, John McTiernan, who directed the original Willis actioner and Vengeance, explained that most of the material that was developed for the aborted third installment was turned into Speed 2, including the iconic scene where the ship washes ashore, causing all kinds of destruction. See, it wasn't all lost.
All in all, Die Hard with a Vengeance is one of my favorite action movies, my most-watched installment in the Bruce Willis action series, and a game-changing blockbuster. Maybe it's for the best that Steven Seagal had to come in and make a mess of things.
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