Die Hard 6 origins tale in the pipeline – is it a good idea?

This week has seen a series of announcements about movie spin-offs, reboots and origins tales, from Fox's two X Men themed series to a TV reboot of My Best Friend's Wedding. None has sparked as much interest as the news that a sixth Die Hard film is in the works.

Twentieth Century Fox and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura have revealed that they are going ahead with Die Hard 6 with Len Wiseman returning to direct the film. Wiseman was at the helm of the fourth, most lucrative, and only PG-13 rated Die Hard instalment Live Free Or Die Hard in 2007.

The new film will be a prequel to the action series set in 1979, according to Digital Spy. It will tell the story of how NYPD officer John McClane learnt the ropes to become the hero we know and love. It's early days yet, as the film has yet to find a screenwriter, but Bruce Willis will reportedly return to play the present day McClane, while a different actor will be given the role of his younger self.

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The idea of Willis working with a younger actor playing the same character is not unprecedented, says Deadline Hollywood. Joseph Gordon-Levitt did it in Rian Johnson's Looper.

Deadline notes that the most recent instalment of Die Hard (A Good Day To Die Hard, 2013), while poorly reviewed, made $300m at the box office, so the franchise still seems viable. The website adds that there should be no shortage of writers vying for the job, because "let's face it, McClane is one of the great action movie characters of the past 40 years".

Responses to the news, however, have tended to be negative.

Social media exploded in a series of "No" and "Don't do it" tweets, while Drew McWeeny on Hitflix wrote an open letter to director Len Wiseman advising him against making the movie. "You are on the verge of doing something monumentally dumb," warned McWeeny.

Here's the problem, he says. Die Hard is the story of John McClane going from being a regular cop to being a die hard kind of guy. That's the entire point of the movie: regular cop, wrong place, right time. Yes, pop culture right now seems to be entirely geared around the idea of over-explaining everything, admits McWeeny, "but the last thing anyone needs is John McClane, beat cop".

However, Rohan Nadkarni writing in GQ has some suggestions about how producers can save the Die Hard franchise.

The fifth Die Hard movie "was pretty trash", admits Nadkarni. Your action movie either has to be slightly plausible or completely implausible, but Die Hard 5 was neither – it was "simultaneously implausible and not over-the-top enough".

So if Die Hard 6 is really going to happen, says Nadkarni, the producers need to make John McClane an everyman again, or have him escape a burning building that's under water in outer space – "anything in between, just, nope".