Screen Rant’s Ryan George takes us back to the original pitch meeting for Die Hard, the movie that people love to point out is actually a Christmas movie. Starring a young Bruce Willis (with hair!), Die Hard was directed by John McTiernan and arrived in theaters a little over three decades ago, earning its place as one of the greatest action movies ever made.
Set in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, Die Hard follows NYPD cop John McClane as he flies cross-country in a bid to reconcile with his wife at her office Christmas party. Unfortunately, this romantic gesture gets interrupted by the arrival of a group of terrorists led by the sinister Hans Gruber (played by the inimitable Alan Rickman), who are actually common criminals with a plan to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the Nakatomi corporation. To make matters worse, no one even knows that the building’s employees are being held hostage… that is, until John helpfully drops a bullet-riddled body out of a window and onto the hood of a cop car.
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Since it’s set at Christmas, Die Hard has long inspired spirited debate about whether or not it’s a Christmas movie – something that Fox recently weighed in on by releasing a Christmas movie trailer to promote the release of the 30th anniversary Blu-ray edition. But was it planned as a holly jolly holiday movie from the start? Let’s take a look at how the pitch meeting for Die Hard almost certainly went down.
We reached out to John McClane for comment on whether or not it was challenging to defeat a skyscraper full of bad guys and rescue dozens of hostages, and surprisingly he told us that it was super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Whether it’s a Christmas movie or not, Die Hard is packed with endlessly quotable lines, bad guys with beautiful hair, and some extremely creative uses of dead bodies as a means of communication. Willis has since returned for four sequels and a sixth Die Hard movie, titled McClane, has been in development for some time, with Len Wiseman set to direct. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has hinted that John and Holly might finally manage to work things out in this next sequel. With the impending acquisition of Fox by Disney, the status of McClane is currently up in the air, but we don’t expect this franchise to lay dormant for much longer.
