It's been almost three years since 20th Century Fox announced that LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD director Len Wiseman was returning to the DIE HARD franchise to craft a film titled DIE HARD: YEAR ONE, which would cut back and forth between Bruce Willis as hero John McClane in present day and a younger version of the character who is working as a beat cop on December 31st, 1978 and dating his future wife / ex-wife Holly. All this time later, there still isn't a production start date for this project…
We did recently hear that Willis was about to read a fresh draft of the script, then just days later it was announced that THE CONJURING's Chad and Carey Hayes had been hired to do a rewrite.
While attending the Fox party for the Television Critics Association, Wiseman took a moment to update the folks over at /Film on the status of DIE HARD: YEAR ONE.
Die Hard’s going to be happening fairly soon. No dates. I’ve been asked about dates before and I’m always wrong. The date is when the script is right which is when we all want to go. The script has taken quite a long time. I want it to be right, as everybody does. The truth is we started prepping Live Free or Die Hard when the script was not ready. That process of working on the script as we were shooting the movie is not the funnest thing in the world to do. We pulled it together but nobody wants to go through that again. I think it’s also more so than any other time, [the script]’s very important. We’ve seen it all. We’ve seen a lot. I think even, say, 10 years ago, I think studios in general were a little bit more willing to put movies like that, franchise movies into production with a sense of ‘we’ll continue to work on the script.’ I think that attitude has changed."
Wiseman also confirmed that the core idea of cutting back and forth between modern events and things that took place forty years ago is still in place.
what we see in the ‘70s has ramifications on present day Bruce."
Which means they'll need to find actors who can play the younger versions of McClane and Holly (who was played by Bonnie Bedelia in DIE HARD and DIE HARD 2). Wiseman said that Willis will be helping choose who plays the younger version of himself, and also teased that we might be seeing a reunion of John and Holly in modern day. Those characters have been on bad terms ever since DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE.
The structure of YEAR ONE sounds intriguing, and it would nice to see John and Holly together again, but after A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD my expectations for this series are as low as it gets.