It’s been almost three years since the final episode of 24 aired, and at the time, Fox had promised that this wouldn’t be the end for Jack Bauer. The plan was for the character to return on the big screen with a 24 feature film written by Billy Ray (State of Play, The Hunger Games). Soon afterward, it came out that Fox had turned down Ray’s script because “it wasn’t strong enough or compelling enough” and Tony Scott was rumoured to be involved with Mark Bomback (Live Free or Die Hard, Unstoppable) being hired to do a rewrite. Then, just as it was about to head into production, the whole thing was shut down due to budgetary issues and time concerns (Sutherland wasn’t happy with his proposed salary and was concerned the movie wouldn’t be done before the next season of Touch started up). Now Antoine Fuqua, the man who was actually going to direct it, has pretty much confirmed that the 24 movie is dead.

While doing press for his upcoming movie Olympus Has Fallen, Fuqua gave The Playlist the unfortunate news:

“Yeah, that’s not happening. I don’t think it’s gonna happen at all, definitely not with me… I met with Kiefer [Sutherland], Fox wanted to do it, it was a matter of his schedule before he went off to do his new show [Touch]… I don’t think he was able to get a proper agreement with Fox. The time just passed, and I went off to go to what I was doing.”

The weird thing is that there was also rumoured to be a Die Hard / 24 crossover in development at one time. The title of Die Hard 5 was originally going to be Die Hard 24/7, and according to AICN, that was no coincidence. The fact that Mark Bomback also worked on Live Free or Die Hard might add some evidence to support this theory, although in the end it seems that cooler heads prevailed. The 24 movie was also supposedly being envisioned as a trilogy (surprise, surprise). The longer they wait, however, it’s looking less and less likely that anyone will try to put this project back together. Would you still like to see 24 on the big screen or should they just leave it alone at this point?

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