Bruce Willis Finally Gets a Beginning

“Origin Movies”

When you hear that in conversation among movie geeks, many conjure the idea of how a hero came to be super. While those are among some of the best — Deadpool, Captain America: The First Avenger, Iron Man, and of course the standard bearer, Batman Begins — there have been others that are supremely good at telling the tale of how it all began, such as Revenge of the Sith, The Hobbit, Casino Royale, and The Godfather: Part II.

And now, more than three decades later, we are about to get another that may reach that illustrious ilk. Len Wiseman, director of Total Recall (2012), Underworld, and most notably for this conversation, Live Free or Die Hard, has finally announced that the movie casually know as Die Hard 6 will now be known as McClane.

Arguably one of the most iconic characters in action movie history, Detective John McClane, is getting an origin story!

Back in 2015, Collider called it upon word that Fox was looking to bring Wiseman back to the Die Hard fold, along with producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. The idea then was the search was on for a screenwriter who would tell the tale of a young rookie beat cop in New York, 1979.

Three years later, Collider shared an excerpt from an interview with Wiseman pertaining to his latest direction on Lucifer. The interview went the way of Die Hard.

After doing the fourth one, there were so many conversations that Bruce [Willis] and I were having about what he put into the character for Die Hard 1. That character comes in with so much baggage, emotionally, and experience. He’s already divorced, he’s bitter, his Captain hates him and doesn’t want him back. So, what created that guy?

Something we’d all like to know: Who really is the dude quoting Roy Rogers with a cagey New York slant?

We’ve never seen the actual love story. We know its demise, but we’ve never seen what it was like when he met Holly, or when he was a beat cop in ‘78 in New York when there was no chance of him making detective. It’s always been something I’ve been thinking about, and now we’re doing it. And it ties in.

This is bananas! But the name, its mononymous appeal for us all was confirmed directly by di Bonaventura…

You can tell our intention by the fact that the title page we handed in says, McClane. We want you to get invested in John McClane more than ever before.

Now if only we could ignore that Bruce Willis said Die Hard was not a Christmas movie. Eh, bah humbug!