Let’s be honest with ourselves for a second; nobody in charge of making the Die Hard films cares about the Die Hard franchise. Bruce Willis will play a clown at your birthday party if you paid him enough. Fox barely cares about their X-Men franchise and everything else is just a way to make money. The original director is in jail and none of the writers even attempted to stay true to the original John McClane. And that’s a brief history review of why A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD got made and why it was painful to watch. But the fact of the matter is; when you take a once beloved American action hero and stick him overseas, foreign audiences will eat it up. In the case of Die Hard 5, that was to the tune of over $300 million. So if you’re an executive at Fox and you have a chance to make a cool $300 million on a modest budget starring Bruce Willis, without putting any energy into it, why wouldn’t you greenlight the project?
That brings us to DIE HARD 6 or as they’re calling it right now DIE HARDEST (please no). The sixth film in the lucrative series is currently being written by Ben Trebilcook and will see John McClane in Tokyo. Yep, if Russian audiences will come out in droves to see Bruce Willis in Russia, just imagine what the Asian audiences will do to see him in Tokyo. But the real kicker to this news is Trebilcook when he said “It is extremely faithful to the franchise and characters and is a natural progression. It’s also a very plausible storyline. I feel it could be the Rocky Babloa of the Die Hard franchsie”. No, I don’t know if he was able to say that with a straight face, but if he thinks Fox is going to make a Die Hard movie that isn’t just a series of mindless (and cheap) stunts, then he’s mistaken. My guess is that he was hired to write a script that does just that and he’s just kidding himself. This is still in the treatment phase and there’s no word on whether Jai Courtney will return or who will direct, but expect things to start moving quickly. Bruce Willis isn’t getting any younger. (TheWrap)
