10 Dumb Mistakes That Ruined Once Great Franchises

Coming in 1988 (July, not December, because this isn't a Christmas movie), Die Hard in many ways marked an end, or at least an evolution, of the machismo that had dominated action cinema in the 1980s. Instead of a 'roided up hulk machine gunning down Ruskies, John McClane was an everyman, a down-on-his-luck street cop whose main concern was fixing his broken family, and as he slowly took down Hans Gruber and his twelve disciples, he paved a new path for gun-toting heroes.

It was a maturing of a genre built of blood splatter and quips, and while there's certainly other factors in that, Die Hard's a biggie.

It's somewhat ironic, then, that the later Die Hard movies have been defined by Bruce Willis (who, lest we forget, was a comedy actor before heading to the Nakatomi building) becoming increasingly less believable and John McClane a more generic, indestructible action goon. By A Good Day To Die Hard, he was everything he'd set out to skewer, and there wasn't a hint of irony in it (not that Willis would stretch himself to ironic these days).