10 Movie Sequels That Pointlessly Took Away Things Fans Loved
2. The R Rating - Live Free Or Die Hard
The Die Hard franchise is defined by several things: Bruce Willis's wise-cracking everyman cop John McClane, smug douchebag villains getting their deliciously satisfying comeuppance, and an R rating.
With their potty-mouthed screenplays and grisly action sequences, the first three Die Hard films certainly earned their adult-skewing content ratings, and so much of the excitement surrounding 2007's belated fourth film was muted when Fox quietly confirmed that it was being rated PG-13 in the pursuit of fatter profits.
The thing is, Live Free or Die Hard is a good movie, but due to its neutered, sanitised approach to violence and especially swearing, it just doesn't quite feel like Die Hard.
The PG-13 rating means that even McClane's iconic catchphrase, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherf**ker!" could only be spoken aloud with a gunshot disguising the offending word, while the overwhelming majority of the action was near-bloodless.
Though there is an Unrated home video release of the movie with liberal use of the "F-word," a lot of the swearing has clearly been dubbed in post-production, while all of the blood was also added digitally after-the-fact.
The version that the majority of the fans have seen is the clean, "family-friendly" version released in cinemas, and that's just not what Die Hard has ever been about.
Ironically, the R rating was restored for the fifth film in the series, A Good Day to Die Hard, but it didn't help much, given that the film was, well, terrible.