The MCU Is Doing Die Hard Better Than Bruce Willis

The latest trailer has established Hawkeye as a Christmas action romp that promises to fulfill Die Hard’s original role better than the more recent Bruce Willis movies have been able to. The debate over whether Die Hard can be truly classified as a “Christmas movie” has raged for a long time. Hawkeye is set to provide a lot of parallels to the original Die Hard movies while also having a conceit in place to allow it to unambiguously be a Christmas story.

The first Die Hard movie has become a classic for audiences who believe it to be a Christmas movie and for those who don’t. The film sees a cynical, wise-cracking, NYPD detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) attempt to attend a Christmas party with his estranged wife, Holly Gennero (Bonnie Bedelia), at Nakatomi Plaza. During this, terrorists led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) take over the building and McClane has to go full action hero in the hopes of getting to spend Christmas with his family. Die Hard 2 repeats a lot of these beats to great success, but is based around an airport at Christmas instead.

After the first two Die Hard movies, later films in the franchise seemed to forget what made the first ones successful, going as far as to use a discarded Lethal Weapon script for Die Hard with a Vengeance which took the series in a very different direction. The Hawkeye trailer appears to be learning a lot of key lessons from the first two films for the MCU’s first explicit Christmas story. The trailer for the Disney+ show borrows elements from the early Die Hard franchise such as the juxtaposition of jaunty Christmas music with aggressive action sequences and Clint Barton’s (Jeremy Renner) cynical quipping as a natural stand-in for John McClane. While Die Hard might have lost its way, Hawkeye is here to take up the mantle.

However, Hawkeye can go one better than just imitating the original Die Hard movies. In the Disney+ TV show, there are character and plot opportunities that can allow Clint Barton to provide a more traditional Christmas narrative for 2021. While Willis’ John McClane spent the first movie motivated in part by trying to win back the affection of his wife, Renner’s Clint Barton has been well-established as a family man first and foremost. This provides a chance for Barton’s “getting home for Christmas” narrative to be focused more on his family than on what he will gain from a success.

The seasonal nature of the story is likely to be amplified by the addition of Hawkeye’s new protégé, Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), in a way that Die Hard never achieved. While he appears to initially go after Bishop because she is impersonating his Ronin persona, once he has found her his choice to continue helping her plays into two classic Christmas movie tropes: the charity of welcoming a stranger into your family, and atoning for past mistakes and misdeeds. While it is possible that Hawkeye might kill Clint Barton, it seems equally likely the series will conclude with the Barton family and Bishop sitting down to a large roast turkey together.