If Die Hard was to be a success, the studio knew they needed a bona fide action star in the part, so they set about offering it to a seemingly never-ending list of A-listers of the time. Bruce Willis was hardly the studio's first choice for the lead in Die Hard. According to de Souza, Escape Plan is the closest to his original Commando 2 idea and Die Hard was never supposed to be anything but Die Hard. But according to Stephen de Souza, the screenwriter of both Die Hard and Commando, while there was a sequel to Commando planned, the only similarity with Die Hard is that they both took place in buildings. This is one of the most popular internet stories about Die Hard.

Die Hard was never supposed to be a sequel to Commando. Originally, it was Clint Eastwood who owned the movie rights to Nothing Lasts Forever, which he had planned to star in in the early 1980s. Clint Eastwood planned to take a stab at playing John McClane. He has no name and if you blink you’ll miss him, but the role simply required that Willis entered a diner as Sinatra’s character left it. In 1980, Willis made his film debut (albeit uncredited) in the crime thriller The First Deadly Sin. Bruce Willis's big-screen debut was with Frank Sinatra. At the age of 73, he smartly turned it down. Frank Sinatra got first dibs on playing the role of John McClane in Die Hard.īecause he had starred in the big-screen adaptation of The Detective, Frank Sinatra had to be offered the role in its sequel.

He eventually turned that snippet of an idea into a sequel to The Detective. After seeing the film, Thorp had a dream about a man being chased through a skyscraper by a group of men with guns. The idea for Nothing Lasts Forever was inspired John Guillermin’s 1974 disaster flick The Towering Inferno. Die Hard was inspired by The Towering Inferno. In 2013, Thorp’s long out-of-print book was resurrected to coincide with the film’s 25th anniversary.

The movie is based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 crime novel Nothing Lasts Forever, which is a sequel to his 1966 novel, The Detective. Think some action-loving Hollywood scribe came up with the concept for Die Hard? Think again. Here are 30 things you might not know about the movie, which was released on July 15, 1988. What do you get when you mix one part action movie with one part holiday flick and add in a dash of sweaty tank top? Die Hard, John McTiernan’s genre-bending (Christmas?) action masterpiece for the ages, which sees a badass NYPD cop take on a skyscraper full of bad guys in the midst of an office holiday party.

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