10 Famous Movie Endings That Had Radical Last Minute Changes

5. Die Hard With A Vengeance Ruined John McClane's Life

There is an accepted ordering of quality for the Die Hard films, and that is 1. Die Hard 2. Die Hard With A Vengeance 3. All the other crappy ones that are either exactly the same as the first one or totally different action films that happen to have Bruce Willis and vests in. The production of the first film was pretty weird in itself - it was based on a novel called No One Lives Forever and Frank Sinatra was in line to play John McClane for a time - but that's nothing compared to the original ending for the third (and second best, remember) film, which was almost as bleak as that of Se7en. Almost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNz_ilr7eQg The point of John McClane as a character is that he's a fallible, vulnerable human. He's an underdog. He's divorced. He cuts his feet on glass. But he ultimately prevails, and everything sort of works out for him in the end. In Die Hard With A Vengeance he's still separated from his wife, and has been suspended from the police force, but by the end he's managed to stop Simon Gruber - brother of Alan Rickman's Hans, who got thrown off the top of the Nakatomi Tower in the first film - and saved New York City from more of his bombings, whilst also making a new BFF in Samuel L Jackson's Zeus Carver. Yeah, before that Hollywood ending got put together, things were supposed to have gone from bad to worse to rock bottom for our grubby, balding hero. In the alternate ending Gruber got away with his daring gold heist, and McClane got the blame for it. He was thrown off the force permanently and the FBI took away his pension. Broken and with nothing left to lose, he tracks Simon down to a Hungarian bar, where he killed the villain in cold blood. With a rocket launcher. Pretty dark for an action movie star, and so, it ended up on the cutting room floor.