9 Last-Minute Changes That Ruined Movies
7. Die Hard 4.0 - Toning Down The Violence
People watch Die Hard movies for two reasons: to see Bruce Willis shooting bad guys, and to hear him say "Yippee-ki-yay, motherf****r" every time he does that.
Willis's John McClane didn't get to do anywhere near enough of the former in Die Hard 4.0 - or Live Free Or Die Hard, if you prefer the American title - as the studio decided to tone down the violence in director Len Wiseman's original.
The idea was to obtain a PG-13 rating in the US, in the hope of targeting the lucrative family demographic. A box office haul of $383.5 million suggests the movie achieved that, but at the expense of betraying its all-guns-blazing predecessors.
Simply put, the cinematic cut of Die Hard 4.0 just isn't Die Hard. The first three movies were stamped with a hard R-rating, and that comes with the territory. Wiseman's director's cut was eventually released on DVD, and while it was still full of plotholes, at least the bad guys were full of bullet holes when McClane was done with them.