'Live Free Or Die Hard' may not be one of the better 'Die Hard' films, but it was successful enough financially to garner a fifth (earned $384 million worldwide) and according to
Bruce Willis himself, even a sixth is on its way. Now we've known that a script for 'Die Hard 5' is being written by
Skip Woods ('X-Men Origins:Wolverine', 'Swordfish') for a while now and that is likely to go into principal photography soon, for a 2012 release. We fully expect the fourth movie's director
Len Wiseman to return. But the news that
Bruce Willis thinks six movies with the ever-popular action hero is good enough is interesting.
In the next few years, they could easily find a replacement for me or call the character someone else. But for me, I want to do Die Hard 5, then one final Die Hard movie Die Hard 6 before finally hanging that white vest up for good. At the moment, I can run and I can fight on screen. But there will come a time when I no longer want to do that. Thats when Ill step away from the Die Hard films".
I'm one of those guys who likes to see my favorite characters go out on top, and in that sense retiring John McClane after
'Die Hard 6' is fine by me. Though, the part about "finding a replacement" gives me uncomfortable shudders, but I'm hoping 20th Century Fox will do the right thing and not put a new face on McClane in some ridiculous prequel or whatnot. Did I just show optimism towards a Hollywood studio that just last year gave us
'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'? Ugh...
Willis also spoke about the origins of the famous
"Yippee-ki-yay motherf****r!" line, which was cut-short in the
Live Free Or Die Hard thanks to PG13 constraints;
Take the first Die Hard, I was the one who came up with the line, Yippee ki-yay motherf****r! The producers were trying to give me their take on how I should say a certain line at that point in the movie, and I disagreed. [] So they said, You do it. So I did. Yippee ki-yay was some goofy thing that cowboys used to say in those movies, so I added the motherf****r bit as I thought it was a nice, contrasting combination of the two images. And it worked. That expressions really stuck around, thats for sure.
Back to John McClane's retirement, I guess you could say it's a bittersweet deal. Lets hope the next two 'Die Hard' films do the character justice instead of slapping a 'family-friendly' sign on it just so that it can cater to a bigger audience. Bruce Willis is currently starring in the action flick
'RED' and is tentatively scheduled to go toe to toe with
Sylvester Stallone in the sequel to
'The Expendables'.