The Bruce Willis movie that was deleted from history: “It was headed in that direction”
It’s incredibly rare for an actor to sign on for a movie and start shooting it, only for the whole thing to go tits up and be banished into Hollywood purgatory, never to be seen or heard from again. And yet, it happened to Bruce Willis twice.
It worked out much better for the action icon the first time around, though. After conspiring to tear down 1997’s Broadway Brawler by turning his rampant ego into a weapon of mass destruction, Willis was staring a hefty lawsuit in the face from the Disney machine for almost single-handedly torpedoing a production the company had spent an awful lot of money on.
To avoid being sued, the star agreed to make three films for the ‘Mouse House’ at a fraction of his usual salary. The first two were M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Michael Bay’s Armageddon, and while hardly anyone remembers The Kid, two massive hits out of three ain’t bad.
The erstwhile John McClane must have been wondering how the hell he managed to find himself in the same situation again almost two decades later, although one positive was that nobody was pointing the finger of blame in his direction, as had been the case on Broadway Brawler.
In February 2015, cameras started rolling on John Pogue’s Wake, with Willis cast intriguingly against type in the lead role of Red Forrester, a violent sociopath who returns to his childhood home on an isolated island to attend his brother’s wake, only to be called into action to save the family who ostracised him when they end up under siege from mysterious assailants.
Admittedly, the movie was made in the throes of the former A-lister’s straight-to-video era, so the chances were high that it wouldn’t be very good, but it did at least boast a decent cast that also numbered Ben Kingsley, Ellen Burstyn, and Piper Perabo.
Wake was shut down less than two weeks into shooting due to financing issues, and for a brief minute, it seemed only temporary. The production company released a statement claiming it was “working quickly to remedy the delay” and that business would resume as usual in “approximately two to three weeks,” which didn’t happen.
By the beginning of April, and with no sign of additional funding coming from anywhere, Willis and Pogue walked out. One person close to Wake informed Deadline that “it was headed in that direction for a while,” and with the actor having other projects lined up in his schedule that he couldn’t delay, he was left with no choice but to abandon ship and head off to make movies he knew would actually be finished.
Avi Lerner, the veteran producer and frequent Willis collaborator, attempted to find the money required to resuscitate Wake, to no avail. Instead, the rest of the ensemble and the entire crew were informed that the movie wouldn’t proceed as planned, rendering everything filmed through those first couple of weeks redundant, casting the semi-completed picture into the abyss and deleting it from history.
