Timing is everything, horses for courses, styles make fights, and every movie, no matter how packed with potential on the page, is subject to the whims of fate. And here’s a casting “what if” that, had it gone a different way, might’ve turned one of the most beloved movies of the 1990s into a colossal flop.
Let’s take a trip back to late June 1988. The summer movie season is in full swing. After a pokey start thanks to Ron Howard’s Memorial Day dud “Willow,” the box office has picked up under the power of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Big,” and “Coming to America.” Moviegoers were gearing up for the July releases, which, with the likes of “Short Circuit 2,” “Arthur 2: On the Rocks,” and “License to Drive” on deck, did not look particularly promising.
And what to make of “Die Hard?” A big R-rated action movie ought to be starring musclemen like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger — maybe Clint Eastwood (though he was getting awfully long in the tooth for this kind of thing at age 58). Bruce Willis, the smirky star of the popular mystery-comedy series “Moonlighting,” should not be strapping on an Uzi and blasting away bad guys. That 20th Century Fox paid $5 million for Willis’ services after just about everyone in town passed gave this flick the whiff of folly.
By the end of month, people were lining up for their first or second viewing of “Die Hard,” while critics swooned over a refreshingly smart actioner with an everyman hero who bled and cried as convincingly as he quipped. Bruce Willis was already a star. Now he was an action icon. What else could the guy do?
A romantic drama? Willis might’ve been up for it had his character not been a dead man.
Bruce Willis turned down Ghost because he ‘didn’t get it’
In a 1996 interview with Playboy, Bruce Willis was asked if he’d ever turned down a movie that went on to be a hit. Willis’ answer:
“How about ‘Ghost?’ Knucklehead Bruce Willis. I just didn’t get it. I said, ‘Hey, the guy’s dead. How are you gonna have a romance?’ Famous last words. But I don’t regret it, because it just doesn’t matter. It’s down the road, under the bridge.”
Willis couldn’t be too hard on himself for passing on the romantic thriller that starred his wife Demi Moore and stunned the industry by becoming the second highest grossing film of 1990 (behind “Home Alone,” which was also a bit of a stunner). He did have “Die Hard 2” that year, which outgrossed the original globally by $100 million. But while “Ghost” was earning awards nominations at the end of the year and into 1991, Willis was smarting from the critical and commercial wipeout that was “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
As much as I love Willis, I think Patrick Swayze’s boyish sincerity was a perfect match for Whoopi Goldberg’s gut-busting hysterics. Willis was often a hair-trigger away from the same kind of energy that earned Goldberg a Best Supporting Actress Oscar; he might’ve knocked the mixture off. It’s interesting to ponder what could have been, and important to remember one last showbiz adage, this one coined by screenwriter William Goldman: Nobody knows anything. For instance, who thought an understated thriller about a boy who sees dead people, one of which happens to be Bruce Willis, would become one of the top grossing films of 1999? Not many. But Bruce Willis believed.
