10 Abandoned Scripts Better Than The Finished Movie
6. Live Free Or Die Hard Pulled Every Punch... And A Lot Of Blood
At the turn of the millennium, the suits in Hollywood realized they could manage to milk more profit from a PG-13 rated film than a hard R. Thus we were subject to a few dozen lightweight entries into franchises that tried to be pre-teen friendly - PG-13 Scream knock-offs and action sequences that packed no punch.
Live Free or Die Hard is a special example, as the studio didn't even bother to tell director Len Wiseman that they were turning the fourth Die Hard film into a PG-13, muting the infamous "Yippie Kay Aye Motherf****r" with a gunshot and removing a lot of blood with CGI.
It's worth noting that, until the unspeakably awful fifth film, no Die Hard had been an original script. The first was based on a novel called Nothing Lasts Forever, starring a character formerly portrayed by Frank Sinatra in The Detective. The second is based on a novel called 58 Minutes. The third was a spec script called Simon Says that was originally the basis for a Lethal Weapon sequel. And Live Free was based on a script that was inspired by an article in Wired entitled "A Farewell to Arms."
It's somewhat of an irony that this is the action franchise that would pull back, given that its survival was based on expansion (building
Alas, the draft by Mark Bomback had much more violence and swearing, and even the unrated director's cut only restores blood with CGI. We'll never get a hard-R John McClane again, we'll get Bald Terminator surfing on F-14s all the while careful not to make a swear.