(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 11 January 2026 14:45, UK
Only the biggest stars in the business can bend a big-budget movie to their will, and in the mid-1990s, stars didn’t come much bigger than Bruce Willis, who flexed his A-list muscles to ensure that one of his biggest hits didn’t end on a note that wouldn’t have sent many people home happy.
During his time as a Hollywood institution, Willis earned a reputation for being difficult to work with on occasion. That headstrong nature often got the better of him, seeing as he’s one of the few actors to have started shooting two movies that were scrapped before the end of principal photography.
He took the blame for one of them, which worked out phenomenally in the end when, at the risk of being sued by Disney, he agreed to sign a three-picture deal with the studio at a drastically reduced rate. The first two of those films were Armageddon and The Sixth Sense, and all sins were swiftly forgiven.
Thanks to the lasting cultural legacy of Die Hard, John McClane will always be known as Willis’ career-defining role. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, when the original is one of the greatest action movies of all time, and the ongoing success of the franchise gave him the leeway to put his foot down.
In the third chapter, Die Hard with a Vengeance, McClane and Samuel L Jackson’s Zeus Carver save the day by thwarting the nefarious plan of Jeremy Irons’ Simon Gruber, rushing into a warehouse full of bad guys and ultimately killing the villain via an exploding helicopter. However, that wasn’t the original plan.
John McTiernan shot a finale that sees Gruber and his gang get away with stealing the gold bullion they were after, before picking things up a year later. McClane takes the blame, gets fired from the NYPD, has his pension taken away, and gets divorced from his wife, so not exactly happy stuff.
Nonetheless, he tracks down Gruber to end things once and for all, which he does by playing Russian roulette with a rocket launcher in Hungary. The pair exchange riddles, Gruber gets one wrong, McClane forces him to pull the trigger, and he gets a hole blown through him. Cut, and end credits. It sounds stupid, and Willis wasn’t having it.
“We reshot the ending, which I predicted, not that I’m smart or anything,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I just knew that the ending we were going with wasn’t a Die Hard ending. It wouldn’t satisfy the audience when they said ‘One Year Later’ at the end; you never want to see that.”
He was scheduled to shoot Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys immediately afterward, and had the sneaking suspicion he’d be called back in for Die Hard with a Vengeance reshoots. To get ahead of the game, he fought for a more on-brand conclusion, and his wishes were granted, although the alternate ending can be easily found online, so he didn’t get everything he wanted.
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