The Screen Addict | White House Taken

One of my fondest memories of the Festival de Cannes – aside from meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger – is when the team and I attended an awesome presentation of the hottest project on the market back in 2012.

Not much was shared in advance, just a logline that read “Die Hard in The White House”. To be honest, that was all I really needed to know. Developed by our friends from Millennium Media (the tall, grey-haired gentleman in the foreground is head honcho Avi Lerner) the property was introduced to us in style by the only Action star worthy of following in Bruce Willis’s footsteps – Gerard Butler.

As you can see, the film we would eventually release as Olympus Has Fallen (2013) was originally titled White House Taken. A phenomenal title – and part of the appeal – but as Sony’s Columbia Pictures was developing a similar film named White House Down (2013) simultaneously, the former Go-Go boys decided they needed to distance themselves from corporate Hollywood. This is how the …Has Fallen franchise was born.

Whether Sony or Millennium Media first came up with the simple but brilliant concept of “Die Hard in The White House”, is the topic of much debate. One fact is beyond speculation, though – OHF was first in cinemas and ultimately won the box-office crown, too.

Largely shot at Lerner’s Nu Boyana Film Studios in Bulgaria, the film benefited from the independent mogul’s lean-and-mean production MO, and gave the big-budget Hollywood equivalent a genuine run for its money.

The bottom line – WHD made $200 million on a $150 million production budget. Major studios like Columbia generally spend about half the production costs of a film on marketing, which brings the total spend on WHD to $225 million.

OHF conversely, made $170 million on a $70 million budget.

It is impossible to calculate the worldwide promotion costs of OHF – the film was pre-sold to foreign territories – but I am pretty sure it was less than $75 million. Today, OHF has spawned two sequels and a third, Night Has Fallen, is in development. Meanwhile, WHD is the only Roland Emmerich film that no one really remembers…

You do the math.

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Twitter (X): Robin Logjes | The Screen Addict