8 Small-Scale Movies That Blew Up Into Blockbuster Action Franchises

A hostage movie starring a sitcom actor that takes place almost entirely inside an office building during Christmas? Who honestly thought this was the recipe for perhaps the greatest action movie of all time?

Die Hard was a marked change from the big, greasy, bodybuilding action heroes of the 80s to the average joe hero of the 90s. John McClane wasn't an unstoppable killing machine, he was just a regular human dude who bled just like the rest of us. And for the most part, that's how Bruce Willis played him in the original trilogy.

Those first three films spawned a litany of off-brand action movies that tried to replicate the idea - including Speed (Die Hard on a city bus), Passenger 57 (Die Hard on a plane), Under Siege (Die Hard on a ship), and Sudden Death (Die Hard on ice) - but none rivaled those that featured McClane at the helm.

After years of painful imitators, the franchise was resurrected with Willis stepping back into the ring more than a decade later. And holy hell did they go all-in with over-the-top action sequences. When Live Free or Die Hard rolled around, it was clear that John McClane was not the crafty, resourceful everyman of yesteryear. He was a human terminator.

As the budgets ratcheted skyward, so did its appeal as a summer blockbuster extravaganza. And as Michael Scott so eloquently put it, "In Die Hard 4, he is jumping a motorcycle into a helicopter. In air. He's invincible. It just sort of lost what Die Hard was."

Which is true. But that didn't stop the money from pouring in.