You can be forgiven if you’ve lost count how many times Willis has played this part, as the filmmakers have mostly avoided using numbers in the titles—though they did use a numeral for Die Hard 2, that movie was more widely known simply as Die Harder.
The other four Die Hard movies all earned a sizeable chunk of their respective summer’s box office, so putting this new one out in the middle of winter seemed a perplexing idea from the moment the release date was scheduled (which, lest we forget, was before a director was even announced).
True, we’re usually taking about a horror or slasher series or a succession of Scary Movie/Police Academy comedy spoofs nobody gives a crap about, but sometimes a more bankable and respectable franchise continues on for the long haul, and the results aren’t always pretty.
Think Star Wars or James Bond, X-Men or Fast and Furious, Rocky or the Pink Panther movies—all of which continued to evolve to five pictures and beyond, with varying results.
For a while there it looked as though we would see both Lethal Weapon 5 and Rambo 5, but while plans for those continuations are currently stalled, there apparently will be a Terminator 5 and possibly even a fifth Indiana Jones adventure (ideally executed as a motion capture epic a la Tintin).
Early chatter about development of a sixth Die Hard movie is surely pre-release publicity for Part Five, but if it’s got anything to do with how well the new movie scores, color me optimistic that A Good Day to Die Hard will avoid the trajectories of some other major—and majorly disappointing—Parts Five.
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