The classic film that Sylvester Stallone rejected and how it changed Bruce Willis’ life | Films

Sylvester Stallone was the biggest movie star in the mid-1980s. It’s safe to say that Hollywood in those days gravitated towards the man responsible for the successes of the ‘Rocky’ and ‘Rambo’ franchises. For this reason, action film scripts almost always went through him first, as having his name at the top of the poster was seen as a guarantee of box office success.

One of these scripts was that of the film that made a big turning point in the genre at the same time: ‘Die Hard’ (1988). Instead of an invincible and infallible hero, it featured John McLane, a New York cop who, by chance, has to face a group of dangerous terrorists at Nakatomi Plaza, in Los Angeles, on Christmas Eve.

What was he doing there? Trying to get his marriage back together and his wife works at the place. More human than that, ladies and gentlemen, impossible.

Sly, as his closest friends and family call him, however, saw a problem with one of his biggest “assets”. He thought McLane himself and his journey were very similar to Rambo and his proposal, whose second chapter, ‘The Mission’, hit theaters with huge success three years earlier – made an unbelievable $300 million. And he was also bothered by his detractors saying that he always played the same characters.

He preferred to bet on a property of his own and throw all his chips at that moment on ‘Rambo 3’, which would be released in the same year as ‘Die Hard’. Sylvester Stallone, as time proved, lost that arm, and badly.

Not so much in terms of revenue, since the feature film was far from making a loss, despite earning “only” 2/3 of its predecessor, but it received a lot of criticism due to the story itself, which featured the former Vietnam combatant helping the resistance Islam in Afghanistan against the Soviet invaders. In the climate of the end of the Cold War, with Gorbachev’s rapprochement with the West, it went badly. There are even reports of boos in some theaters in the USA.

Not to mention the historical irony that would mark the film decades later, with 9/11, since the mujahideen who fight alongside John Rambo are the embryo of what would become the Taliban and Osama’s terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden.

With ‘Die Hard’ it was completely different. And look, it made less money than the third ‘Rambo’ – around US$143 million. But it cost a lot cheaper, even due to the fee paid for the protagonist found in the struggle, Bruce Willis, lower than Stallone’s would be, but still very respectable. The artist received around US$5 million, which generated some controversy at the time; There were those who considered it too much money for a name that wasn’t top notch in Hollywood.

Willis was no stranger. He was successful on North American television with the series ‘The Cat and the Mouse’, also popular in Brazil, but he had not achieved any major success in cinemas – and his curriculum until then was marked by comedies, such as ‘Encontro das Escuras’ (Dark Date) ( 1985) and ‘Murder in Hollywood’ (1988), both directed by Blake Edwards, the veteran of the ‘Pink Panther’ franchise, who showed that he had vision beyond reach when pinpointing the guy who would call the shots in the film industry in the 1990s.

It seems unbelievable today, but Bruce Willis was the producers’ eighth choice to star in ‘Die Hard’, who were left wandering around Hollywood looking for someone who could materialize John McLane, especially after Stallone’s refusal.

The role, needless to say, suited the actor like a glove, not least because it lacked a combination of frenetic energy with an acidic touch of comedy – you can’t think of anyone else making fun of terrorists and making self-deprecating jokes while escaping gusts of machine gun or shreds his feet with broken glass.

“‘Die Hard’ is probably the closest I’ve come to showing what’s in my heart in a movie. I don’t know any superheroes. I know guys who have fear and anxiety, and I think you know people like that too. That’s what I wanted to show. I really wanted to be honest about how you act when you think your life is about to end. I wanted to play someone who was afraid of dying”, summed up the actor himself, in an interview a few years ago. back.

The symbiosis between Bruce Willis and John McLane is one of the best in the history of action cinema. The first ‘Die Hard’ became a classic, with four Oscar nominations, all technical, as was usual for films of the genre at that time (it was the most they could get from the Academy), and both the character and the script began to be imitated exhaustively.

Until he retired from his acting career last year, after successive diagnoses of aphasia and dementia, Bruce Willis made four other films in the franchise, the last one ‘Die Hard: A Good Day to Die Hard’ (2013). Not to mention the different variations he played as McLane in other police and action films in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. It was an entire career based on this great success.

Check out the trailer for the classic ‘Die Hard’ (1988) below.