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Fox ponied up $92 million for what seemed like a sure thing on paper. After all, the least successful of the four previous Die Hard movies grossed $81.4 million domestically. Amusingly, that title was the original Die Hard, which became legendary on home video. Also, its inflation-adjusted box office total is $160 million. The Die Hard franchise has always been rock solid.

A Good Day to Die Hard ended that winning streak. The follow-up to Live Free Or Die Hard, a $134.5 million winner, followed the same mold. One of the McClane children mentioned in the first film is now all grown up, which is reasonable since that movie was released in 1988. Papa John the Invincible must head to Mother Russia to save him. Apparently, taking the Die Hard franchise out of the country is a bad move. A Good Day to Die Hard was a disaster from the start. Fox advertised it obsessively, which is rarely a good sign.

What became clear almost immediately is that Fox knew they had a clunker. The opening weekend of A Good Day to Die Hard reflected an instant 24% decline in the brand. And the situation would get worse from there. The fourth Die Hard movie opened to $33.4 million on its way to a final domestic result of $134.5 million. A Good Day to Die Hard certainly seemed disappointing when it started with $24.8 million. The worst was yet to come.

Die Hard 5 was frontloaded in a way that had never been the case with any previous title in the franchise. Its atrocious quality caused it to flame out quickly at the box office, ending with only $67.3 million domestically. While the overseas revenue remained solid, A Good Day to Die Hard is clearly the worst performer in the history of the franchise. It earned barely half of Live Free Or Die Hard domestically as well as $60 million less than Die Hard: With a Vengeance managed worldwide. And the latter film was released 18 years ago. For the first time ever, a Die Hard project failed as consumers once again shunned an aging action hero.

The news was not any better for Bruce Willis a few months later. His other “safe” project for 2013 was another sequel, Red 2. The follow-up to the surprise 2010 hit was given a production budget of $84 million. The expectation was that it would match if not surpass the $196 million earned by Red. Obviously, that did not happen. Red 2 failed to meet even the most realistic of expectations, grossing $53.3 million domestically. That total represents less than 60% of Red’s $90.4 million tally. Globally, Red 2 finished with $137.2 million, almost $60 million short of the first film.

Bruce Willis tried to play it safe in 2013 with a pair of no-brainer sequels. Both of them failed as audiences put him out to pasture. Had G.I. Joe not been delayed into 2013, Willis would have suffered the worst year of his career. And let’s be honest that G.I. Joe’s success was primarily due to the presence of Channing Tatum and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the new breed of action stars, rather than Willis.

Every new year starts with the philosophy of out with the old, in with the new. When the New Year’s Eve ball dropped at the beginning of 2013, studios went against the popular adage. Instead, they tried to force feed consumers with the greatest hits of the 1980s. The end result is that audiences found Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis every bit as fresh as Duran Duran, Tiffany and New Kids on the Block. A recent Ridley Scott movie proclaimed that a king has his reign then he dies. In the case of the aging action movie heroes, all of those bullets they inexplicably dodged 30 years ago finally hit them all at once.

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