The Die Hard prequel McClane has been canceled, but a straight-up Die Hard 6 was always a far better idea. News of McClane‘s cancellation came after a long period of development, with little outward momentum seen during that time. With 20th Century Fox being folded into Disney and the impact the Fox-Disney merger has had on numerous IPs like X-Men, the parent company’s family-friendly business model could be the reason behind McClane being axed, but even absent that, the fact is that it was simply an ill-conceived project.
The essence of Die Hard historically always served as a counterpoint to the over-the-top 80s action heroes embodied by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. John McClane was meant to be a more down-to-earth everyman who finds himself in over his head in the harrowing terrorist and kidnapping plots of most action movies and having to improvise his way out. Though McClane had been a New York City cop for eleven years before the first Die Hard, he’d never experienced anything like the takeover of the Nakatomi Plaza by Alan Rickman’s iconic villain Hans Gruber and his associates.
McClane would continue to get entangled in over-the-top action movie plots throughout the series, but he remained a potty-mouthed beat cop with an average build doing everything he could against overwhelming odds. 2013’s A Good Day to Die Hard was where the series really lost its grasp on the hero McClane was conceived as, and McClane itself would’ve done the same for several reasons. The biggest argument for this is that a John McClane prequel is fundamentally at odds with McClane as a character, and especially with the events of the first Die Hard.
As stated above, the first Die Hard showed the Nakotomi Plaza takeover as the kind of situation McClane had never faced before. As just one man against a group of kidnappers, the odds were stacked against McClane at every turn, and even his acquisition of a single machine gun, accompanied by his “Ho! Ho! Ho!” dig at Hans, didn’t tip the scales in his favor in a significant way. A major casting shift for Bruce Willis himself at the time, McClane had to navigate the Nakatomi Plaza with the constant threat of being caught and endured some serious pain in having to run across a floor covered in shattered glass barefoot to escape the gunfire of Hans’ gang.
Due to its nature as an action movie, McClane would have had to put its title character into a scenario of a similar caliber as the Die Hard movies, which would retcon the first movie. The first movie portrayed McClane as an underdog trying to survive a foreign situation in his efforts to save the say; if he were to experience something similar in a prequel movie, then his inexperience in the first movie would have been completely contradicted. This is why, despite the implosion of A Good Day to Die Hard aside, Die Hard 6 was always a much better idea.
Die Hard 6 could serve as a Logan-style swan song for Bruce Willis’ signature character, giving McClane one last adventure, and perhaps even having him die a heroic death to retire one of the greatest heroes in action movie history. Despite Die Hard being a mostly R-rated series (Live Free Or Die Hard notwithstanding), the franchise’s popularity is such that Disney will probably revive it as is happening with the upcoming Predator movie. In any case, when it comes to the Die Hard movies, going the prequel route with McClane just wouldn’t have worked.
