The fifth adventure of New York cop and genuinely tough guy John McClane is called A Good Day to Die Hard. Bruce Willis has to travel to Russia to help his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney), out of prison, but is soon caught in the crossfire of a terrorist plot.

A Good Day to Die Hard is the first big budget movie of 2013. Its production budget of around $100m is similar to the last two of John McClane’s adventures: Die Hard: With A Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard. In the table below you can see that both production budget and worldwide gross of Die Hard movies is rising, however scores from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes have gone down or at least stayed well below Die Hard, one of the best action movies ever and my personal favourite.





Big budget action movies are usually full of product placement and it looks like A Good Day to Die Hard won’t be an exception. Mercedes-Benz put very interesting piece of information on its website:

“Costarring with Bruce Willis are several Mercedes-Benz models, the G-Class, the Unimog, the Sprinter and the Zetros, the C-Class, Vito, E-Class Saloon as well as the new G 63 AMG, a GL-Class and a Maybach 57.”

My initial response was: “OMG the whole fleet!”





“We are very pleased that we were able to support the new film in the exciting “Die Hard” series with a large number of our vehicles. From the C-Class to the Zetros, the Mercedes-Benz model fleet could not be better suited to this action film with its spectacular stunts in the streets of Moscow. An exciting film with many emotionally appealing vehicles,” said Anders Sundt Jensen, Head of Brand Communication Mercedes-Benz Cars.

“Mercedes-Benz vehicles stand for safety, performance and distinctive design. And they are at home in all major European cities. This suits them perfectly and completely authentically to the screenplay. For example, the G-Class, Sprinter, Unimog and Zetros are the ideal “hero cars” for the hard-as-nails requirements of John and Jack McClane”, added Jensen.





In The Making of A Good Day to Die Hard some folks from production said that Mercedes was very generous and that they gave them more than 70 cars.





I have to admit that I’m sceptical about that product placement. Doing a memorable product placement with cars is an extremely difficult task. Examples of doing it big time resulted in an effect that I call it product placement prostitution, with The Transformers a notable case.

Ok, let’s not jump to conclusions like in the case of Skyfall. Product placement in A Good Day to Die Hard might be good, bad or even ugly. We’ll find out in a few weeks time.



