MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The jet crash in Die Hard 2 was almost removed from the film!

Spoiler Warning, I suppose, for a film that's nearly 30 years old!

Okay, in case you're unfamiliar with Die Hard 2, the cleverly titled first sequel to the blockbuster action film, Die Hard, the film (which I actually did a DIFFERENT Movie Legends Revealed about it just about half a year ago) is about terrorists who take control of a busy airport in the middle of a snowstorm so that they can hijack a plane and escaped with a drug lord dictator.

Our hero, John McClane, is there to pick up his wife at the airport. He realizes something is wrong, so he tries to stop the bad guys.

One of the most messed up scenes in the entire Die Hard franchise occurs when the bad guys, who have taken control of the air traffic control tower (and are therefore not allowing any of the many jets circling the major airport to land), try to dissuade McClane and airport security from trying to stop them anymore by using their control of the airport to alter the readings of where the ground is and so when a British jet with 200 people on board (the pilot was played by Colm Meaney!) is told to land, the ground comes up too quickly and they crash...

There is a great bit where McClane runs on to the runway with flares, hoping that he can somehow warn them in time...

He cannot.

So even when McClane kills all of the bad guys and causes a big enough wreckage (when he destroys the bad guys' plane) that the other jets are able to see the runway and land (including the jet with McClane's wife on it), his "victory" is a bit tainted by the fact that 200 innocent people still just died.

Well, guess who else had a problem with that? Yep, you guessed it, the studio.

Steven E. de Souza, screenwriter of both Die Hard 2 and the original Die Hard, explained it (as reported by SlashFilm's Fred Topel) at a 30th anniversary screening of The Running Man (another film he wrote) that the studio wanted them to cut the scene:

“In fact, the studio insisted. They said, ‘You can’t kill all those people. We’ll lose the audience. It has to be a UPS plane.’ They actually spent money and they filmed a model UPS plane crashing as a fallback position in case the audience left the theater when we crashed the plane after we put the seat belt on the little girl’s teddy bear. Only two people died, a lot of packages are gone.”

When they screened the version with the passenger jet crash, though, the audience didn't seem to mind, so de Sousa noted:

“Fortunately the audience loved the movie at the test screening and we kept it in. For a while, if you didn’t count George Lucas blowing up Princess Leia’s planet, that was the highest body count movie because of the plane crash with imaginary people in it.”

de Sousa explained that he wanted the audience to actually believe that McClane wasn't a superhero, that he COULD fail.

The legend is...

STATUS: True

Thanks to Fred Topel and Steven E. de Souza for the information!

Be sure to check out my archive of Movie Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.