This article has been updated to include two new films – Precious Cargo and Marauders.

It’s not exactly clear when Bruce Willis went from being a big star whose name filled seats and sold tickets to being a guy whose name you see on the cover of so many direct-to-DVD and VOD outings (albeit ones that sometimes get a week or two in a cinema, in essence to promote the VOD release), but I’d like to go out on a limb here and say that Kevin Smith’s mouth might be partly to blame.

During one of his filmed Q&A sessions that ended up winging its way to eager fanboys and girls like myself on DVD back in the late oughts, Smith talked at length about what it was like to work on the much-anticipated fourth instalment of the Die Hard franchise, Live Free Or Die Hard (or Die Hard 4.0, as it was known over here). Not only did the film ultimately end up being a disappointment for many, Smith’s tales of on-set barbequing, re-writes for fun and hundreds of thousands of studio dollars wasted on days waiting for Willis to bother showing up for work pulled back the curtain on just how out of control Willis’ ego had gotten.

Later, Smith’s publically fraught direction of Willis on 2010’s Cop Out ended up pouring more fuel for the fire, and he talked at length about how awful the experience was. His toast at the Cop Out wrap party – “I want to thank everyone who worked on the film, except for Bruce Willis, who is a fucking dick” – triggered gasps all round, and he even took to comedian Marc Maron’s popular podcast to describe the whole thing as “soul crushing.”