John McTiernan helped to both subvert and reinvent the action genre with his classic films Die Hard and Predator, but he hasn’t been behind a camera for a long time. There’s a simple reason for that: he’s been in prison.
Convicted of misleading authorities about his involvement with private investigator and wiretapper Anthony Pellicano, John McTiernan served a 12 month prison sentence (but was released about a month early), and according to an article from Hollywood Reporter, he spent his time preparing a comeback.
While imprisoned John McTiernan wrote a sequel to his 1999 heist movie The Thomas Crown Affair, which starred Pierce Brosnan as a wealthy art thief and Rene Russo as an insurance investigator who tries to seduce Crown into revealing his secrets. The original film was a remake of a popular 1968 caper which starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and the long in-development sequel to McTiernan’s remake was said to be a remake of another classic heist thriller, Jules Dassin’s Topkapi.
The new Thomas Crown sequel is titled Thomas Crown and the Missing Lioness, a pulpy moniker that evokes pleasant memories of the Indiana Jones sequels. No word yet on the plot of the sequel.
McTiernan is also attacked to another project, Red Squad, starring Nicolas Cage. Red Squad is about a DEA team taking on a drug cartel, and with actual talent already on board it seems more likely to be John McTiernan’s first movie project since his release.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
