Originally published March 24, 2015. Updated November 7, 2019.
As previously stated, we at Flickering Myth love Commando. Which is why we’re always upset that it never got a sequel – only it very nearly did! One of the Internet’s most famous rumours is that the script for Commando 2 eventually became Die Hard, the movie that launched the action career of Bruce Willis. However, screenwriter Steven de Souza has confirmed that this is not the case.
“I don’t know how this story started on the Internet – it’s completely wrong,” he told Bristol Bad Film Club. “Die Hard is based on a novel called Nothing Lasts Forever by the author Roderick Thorpe, which is a sequel to his early book The Detective. In fact, a good bar bet if you want to make some cash is to ask someone, ‘Who was the first actor to play John McClane and in what movie?’ They will say, ‘Bruce Willis in Die Hard‘ and you say, ‘No! Frank Sinatra in The Detective!’ and then run out before you get beat up. Interestingly, 20th Century Fox had to contractually offer Bruce Willis’s part in Die Hard to Frank Sinatra because it was a sequel to the original book! Fortunately for Bruce, he said, ‘I’m too old and too rich to act any more.'”
So what was the plot for Commando 2 then?
“So for Commando 2, we figured that Arnold, after blowing up half of Los Angeles, achieves some notoriety, retires from the army and, by the time the sequel occurs, is running a security firm,” de Souza says, noting that Frank Darabont also did a re-write. “The plot would have seen him hired by a big corporation to oversee their security to protect their executives from being kidnapped, to stop people breaking into their building and to make sure their computers are secure. So he sets it up and hires the most dangerous people to be guards in the building and then lo and behold – he discovers the people he’s working for are in the illegal arms business and the big corporation is simply a front.”
“The end of the movie would see Jenny and Cindy, who is now a lawyer, trapped in the building and Arnold now has to defeat all the people he hired – all the meanest, toughest guards – as well as the security systems, the guard dogs, everything! So now, the awareness of Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to break into a building got conflated with Bruce Willis being trapped in a building. If there’s something out there that resembles what Commando 2 was meant to be, it would probably be the recent Stallone/Schwarzenegger movie Escape Plan.”
What do you make of the plot to Commando 2? Would you have liked to have seen that movie?
