Lacey Bridges
A few years back we reported an unremitting legend that “Die Hard” – the timeless ‘Christmas’ classic starring Bruce Willis- eventually started out as a sequel to the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Commando”. Rumour was that writer Steven de Souza wasn’t originally hired to write a John McClane adventure but a John Matrix adventure and that it was only later on, when Schwarzenegger decided he didn’t want to do “Commando 2”, that the film became the movie we know now as “Die Hard”.
All these years later, de Souza has set the record straight. Seems the Chinese whisper got a bit warped after being thrown around back and forth all these years.
During a recent interview with Bristol Bad Film Club, de Souza confirmed that he did write a draft of “Commando 2” but it was separate from the “Die Hard” script – at no time were they one and the same.
“I don’t know how this story started on the Internet – it’s completely wrong. Die Hard is based on a novel called Nothing Lasts Forever by the author Roderick Thorpe, which is a sequel to his early book The Detective. In fact, a good bar bet if you want to make some cash is to ask someone, ‘Who was the first actor to play John McClane and in what movie?’ They will say, ‘Bruce Willis in Die Hard’ and you say, ‘No! Frank Sinatra in The Detective!’ and then run out before you get beat up. Interestingly, 20th Century Fox had to contractually offer Bruce Willis’s part in Die Hard to Frank Sinatra because it was a sequel to the original book! Fortunately for Bruce, he said, ‘I’m too old and too rich to act any more.'”
Now that would have been, er, interesting – with Old Blue Eyes playing McClane [again], no? But would Fox have even greenlit the picture!?
As for “Commando 2”, it never happened, but de Souza recalls the rundown of the story.
“So for Commando 2, we figured that Arnold, after blowing up half of Los Angeles, achieves some notoriety, retires from the army and, by the time the sequel occurs, is running a security firm. The plot would have seen him hired by a big corporation to oversee their security to protect their executives from being kidnapped, to stop people breaking into their building and to make sure their computers are secure. So he sets it up and hires the most dangerous people to be guards in the building and then lo and behold – he discovers the people he’s working for are in the illegal arms business and the big corporation is simply a front. The end of the movie would see Jenny and Cindy, who is now a lawyer, trapped in the building and Arnold now has to defeat all the people he hired – all the meanest, toughest guards – as well as the security systems, the guard dogs, everything! So now, the awareness of Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to break into a building got conflated with Bruce Willis being trapped in a building. If there’s something out there that resembles what Commando 2 was meant to be, it would probably be the recent Stallone/Schwarzenegger movie Escape Plan.”
So, that’s that. Oh, but what about that other rumour… the one that suggests Arnold Schwarzenegger was asked to play John McClane before they went out to the then-unknown Willis?
Guess that’s a question we’ll have to leave unanswered.
