Almost a Die Hard/Beverly Hills Cop Crossover

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Movie Legends: Was There Almost a Die Hard/Beverly Hills Cop Crossover?

By Brian Cronin

Published Jun 2, 2017

In the latest Movie Legends Revealed, was there almost a film that teamed up John McClane and Axel Foley? Find out!

MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: There was almost a crossover film between Beverly Hills Cop and Die Hard.

Reader Dan Q. wrote in to ask me if it was true that a screenplay was written by the screenwriter of Die Hard that would team up the heroes of Die Hard, John McClane, with the hero of Beverly Hills Cop, Axel Foley.

Now, right off the bat, it is interesting to note that John McClane (the cop who keeps getting pulled into crazy situations, whether it be terrorists taking over a high rise office building, terrorists taking over an airport, terrorists taking over New York City, terrorists taking over the internet or what have you) is probably the most adaptable famous movie character that there is, as only the first film and the most recent Die Hard film were actually written with John McClane in mind - all the rest were adaptations of other novels and/or screenplays.

Similarly, the original version of Beverly Hills Cop, about a streetwise cop from Detroit ending up in Beverly Hills, was drastically different from the film that it ended up becoming (most notably, Axel Foley was not going to be black).

So, if any two film characters could pull off a team-up, I could definitely see John McClane and Axel Foley pulling it off (it couldn't be worse than Beverly Hills Cop III, now could it? Which, by the way, was written by Steven de Souza, the guy who wrote Die Hards 1 and 2, and he basically just made Beverly Hills Cop III a riff on Die Hard - "Die Hard in an amusement park" - but the budget couldn't support de Souza's original vision at all, so it ended up super cheap looking).

So here is the alleged screenplay by de Souza...