Bruce Willis Almost Starred In A Sci-Fi Remake Of A Classic John Wayne Western

Whenever Roger Ebert saw a limp Hollywood remake of a classic movie, the esteemed film critic used to lament that studios had it all wrong. They shouldn't be redoing movies that were already brilliant, but, rather, revisiting films with promising premises that, for whatever reason, didn't work the first time out. While this may sound like perfectly reasonable advice, studios typically aren't keen to throw money at projects that already failed once. That's how executives get fired.

This is how we get unwanted, undercooked remakes like 2006's "The Omen," 2012's "Total Recall," and 2014's "RoboCop." The originals were smart, zeitgeisty genre flicks from top-notch directors, while the second go-rounds were sweaty retreads with no point of view and, thus, no reason for being — but at least the execs who greenlit these movies could defend them on the grounds of brand recognition. Had they gone down in flames with a remake of, say, the 1986 Harold Ramis comedy flop "Club Paradise" because they thought there was tremendous potential in that premise, they would get booted off the studio lot.

While many remakes are failures of imagination and originality, sometimes there's value in putting a new spin on a masterfully told tale. John Carpenter proved this with his superb 1982 remake of Christian Nyby's "The Thing from Another World," while Bradley Cooper managed to find new resonance in a fourth version of William A. Wellman's "A Star Is Born" in 2018. Still, some movies feel sacrosanct. Films like Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story," and Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" are simply too personal and/or distinct to be remade. John Ford's "The Searchers" almost certainly belongs in this class — but, amazingly, Warner Bros. once toyed with a new variation of the classic Western featuring Bruce Willis in the John Wayne role.

In 1997, "Falling Down" screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith wrote a script called "The Trail," which, as Variety reported at the time, was meant to be "The Searchers" set in space. The talented Australian director Phillip Noyce, who'd just missed the mark with his big-screen update of Leslie Charteris' "The Saint" (itself intended to be a franchise for Val Kilmer), was attached to direct, but the project got a massive boost when it was announced that Willis would take on the intergalactic version of Wayne's racist Ethan Edwards.

I'm not sure how much audiences would have invested in a version of "The Searchers" where, presumably, an alien race gets substituted for Native Americans, but Wolfgang Petersen once made "The Defiant Ones" work as sci-fi with "Enemy Mine," so anything's possible. Ultimately, WB opted to kill "The Trail" for unknown reasons. It's possible that the collapse of Willis' hockey comedy "Broadway Brawler," a Disney production that went unfinished due in large part to the star's behind-the-scenes meddling, played a role in "The Trail" getting kiboshed — if only because Willis was suddenly on the hook for three Disney movies (which wound up being "Armageddon," "The Sixth Sense," and "The Kid"), and probably would've had a hard time fitting a big-budget sci-fi epic into his schedule.

There have been no reported attempts to revive "The Trail," so it's possible all concerned parties realized they were courting disaster by trying to take "The Searchers" into the cosmos. Transplanting Westerns to sci-fi has worked in the past ("Star Trek: The Original Series" was inspired by the show "Wagon Train," while Peter Hyams brought "High Noon" to Io with "Outland"), but this is evidently one instance where the concept couldn't transcend its genre.