4Die Hard With A Vengeance – 1995
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyGh6S41EGQ
For the third part of Die Hard franchise, John McTiernan returns. Everything seemed to be set for another success, but the way to get there will not be as smooth as before.
Screenplay issues
Several screenplays got rejected for some reasons. For instance, the third movie was supposed to be called Die Hard Troubleshooter in which McClane would fight terrorists on a Caribbean cruise ship, but the film called Under Siege was already in production, and it had the similar plot, so they had to give up on the idea.
The writers for the third film were John Milius, Doug Richardson, and John Fasano, but they had a problem to find something original, something that wasn’t seen before. For instance, the movie Cliffhanger was billed as Die Hard on a mountain, and they didn’t want for Die Hard to be known as a copy of some other film.
Luckily, Jonathan Hensleigh comes to the rescue with a script called Simon Says. The script was written with young Brandon Lee in mind at first, and it was eventually supposed to be the fourth Lethal Weapon movie in which Riggs and Murtaugh would solve riddles to stop the terrorist from triggering bombs all over New York.
What happens next?
As you can assume, the story was used for another adventure with McClane. However, he was not alone this time and was joined by Samuel L. Jackson’s Zeus Carver with the two of them running all over New York solving puzzles and quarreling along the way. To most people, this Die Hard was the most entertaining of all.
