25 Things You Didn't Know About Die Hard With A Vengeance
8. One Of The Proposed Scripts Later Became Speed 2: Cruise Control
20th Century Studios
The longest gap between Die Hard sequels is obviously the twelve year one that occurred between Die Hard with a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard, but the five years it took to make the third entry was still substantial. Die Hard 2 released only a couple of years after the first film, so why did it take so long for the third to get made?
The answer (at least partly) lies in the countless Die Hard imitators and rip-offs that emerged in the wake of the first film's premiere, the most notable being Under Siege.
The Steven Seagal film was essentially just "Die Hard but at sea", which posed a huge problem for writer James Haggin, who at that point had been developing a script for Die Hard 3 where John and Holly would be stuck at sea on their honeymoon cruise following a terrorist hijacking. (Just how unlucky can they get?)
In a somewhat hilarious turn of events, Haggin's script eventually inspired the plot for Speed 2: Cruise Control, one of the most reviled action movie sequels ever released.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
