9 Rejected Ideas That Were Recycled In Other Movies

3. Die Hard 3's Original Plot Became Speed 2

Originally In... Die Hard With A Vengeance

Die Hard 3 went through a number of revisions that would have made it nothing like its two predecessors. In actual fact, the final version was initially intended to be a Lethal Weapon script, hence the dynamic between John McClane and Samuel L Jackson's character.

Presumably, the studio just couldn't get a true John McClane script off the ground. At one point, they even sent him to sea, in a script titled Troubleshooter, which would have seen McClane fighting terrorists on a Caribbean cruise ship. Unfortunately for anyone who wanted to see McClane having his holiday interrupted, the studio learned of Under Seige and realised their story was just too similar and scrapped it.

Not fans of wasting concepts entirely though, 20th Century Fox revisited the idea when it came to making a sequel to Speed (which similarly went through lots of fruitless planning). In place of McClane came Jason Patric's Officer Alex Shaw and the rest was horribly clunky movie sequel history.