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"Die Hard on a ___": the pitch that built a decade of action movies

A New York cop flies to Los Angeles for Christmas. He wants to patch things up with his wife. He ends up barefoot in a skyscraper, outnumbered, with a radio and a bad attitude.

Die Hard opened wide on July 22, 1988. Within a few years the title had stopped being a title. It had become a unit of measurement.

Hollywood started making the same movie in different buildings. Then on different vehicles. Then, briefly, in an ice cream truck.

The blueprint

John McTiernan directed. Bruce Willis played NYPD detective John McClane. Alan Rickman played Hans Gruber, who arrives at the Nakatomi Plaza Christmas party with a crew, a schedule and better tailoring than anyone else in the building.

The source was Roderick Thorp's 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever. The tower was Fox Plaza in Century City. It is still there. It still gets photographed by people who know exactly which floor.

If you'd rather wear the building than visit it, there's the Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza tee.

The formula

Strip Die Hard down and you get four parts. They travel well.

  1. One man. Not a team. Backup exists, but it's outside, on the phone, getting it wrong.
  2. One confined space. A tower, a ship, a bus, an island. Nobody leaves. That's the point.
  3. A hostile takeover. Professionals with a plan, a timetable and hostages.
  4. A hero who isn't supposed to be there. Off duty, visiting, demoted, in the kitchen. Ideally with a few lines ready.

The name became shorthand for overwhelming odds in a restricted space. The pitch wrote itself. You only had to fill in the blank.

Under Siege (1992): Die Hard on a battleship

Under Siege is widely described as "Die Hard on a battleship." Critics said it often enough that it stuck.

Andrew Davis directed, from a script by J.F. Lawton. It opened October 9, 1992. The ship is the USS Missouri. The occasion is the captain's birthday. The uninvited guests are Tommy Lee Jones, as a renegade former CIA operative, and Gary Busey, as the executive officer working the inside.

Steven Seagal plays Casey Ryback, a former Navy SEAL now serving as the ship's cook. The hijackers read "cook" and stopped reading. Formula check: one man, one ship, one takeover, one hero who was supposed to be making dinner. Four for four.

It earned two Oscar nominations, both for sound, and about $156.6 million worldwide. The hat is the giveaway: Under Siege Ryback Chef Hat T-Shirt.

Speed (1994): Die Hard on a bus

Speed is widely described as "Die Hard on a bus." It earns the label.

The family resemblance is not an accident. Jan de Bont shot Die Hard as its cinematographer, and Speed was his first film as director. McTiernan reportedly turned Speed down because the script seemed too close to Die Hard. He would know.

Keanu Reeves plays LAPD officer Jack Traven. Dennis Hopper rigs a city bus to blow if it drops below 50 mph. Sandra Bullock ends up driving. Graham Yost wrote it. He first imagined 20 mph. A friend suggested 50. Good friend.

Speed tweaks the formula in one useful way. The confined space moves. You can't leave, and you can't slow down either. Joss Whedon's dialogue pass a week before filming supplied "Pop quiz, hotshot." The film made about $350 million worldwide and won Oscars for sound and sound effects editing.

The vehicle in question: Speed Bus T-Shirt.

The Rock (1996): Die Hard on Alcatraz

Michael Bay's The Rock opened June 7, 1996. Ed Harris leads a rogue unit that seizes Alcatraz, takes tourists hostage and points nerve gas rockets at San Francisco. Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage go in to stop him.

This one stretches the rules. Two men instead of one. They break in instead of being trapped. It still counts. The island is the building, the clock is running, and nobody on the team was supposed to be there. It made about $335.6 million worldwide.

For the specialists: The Rock VX Gas T-Shirt. For everyone else, the A Can of Whoopass Minimalist T-Shirt.

The rest of the decade

Once the template worked, it worked everywhere. A partial list:

  • Passenger 57 (1992): an airliner
  • Cliffhanger (1993): a mountain, with Sylvester Stallone
  • Sudden Death (1995): a hockey arena during the Stanley Cup Finals
  • Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995): a train
  • Con Air (1997): a prison transport plane
  • Air Force One (1997): the president's plane
  • Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997): a cruise ship
  • Chill Factor (1999): an ice cream truck carrying a chemical weapon

We said briefly.

The pitch outlived the decade. In 2013, two studios made Die Hard in the White House within months of each other: Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. We covered that fight in Twin films: when Hollywood made the same movie twice.

Meanwhile, the original

Willis didn't wait around for the copies. Die Hard 2 put McClane in Washington Dulles airport in 1990. Same holiday, worse luck.

In December 1991 he played Joe Hallenbeck, a disgraced former Secret Service agent turned private investigator, in Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout. Shane Black's script sold for $1.75 million, a record at the time. It isn't Die Hard on anything. It's Willis, Damon Wayans and an even worse attitude. The pep talk is on the Last Boy Scout T-Shirt. Fair warning: the print spells out the last word.

Two of the decade's three biggest names worked the formula. Stallone got a mountain. Willis got the building. For all three in one place: Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis Action Trio T-Shirt.

Why it kept working

A pitch is one sentence. Die Hard made one sentence enough.

The good copies remembered the fourth rule. The hero isn't supposed to be there, and the villains find that out too late. The bad copies remembered only the building.

Pick your blank. Somebody probably already filmed it.

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Read next: Twin films: when Hollywood made the same movie twice