The early 1990s weren’t exactly kind to Sylvester Stallone, especially when compared to his dominant ‘80s era, propelled by the likes of the Rocky sequels, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Cobra. His first three movies during the ‘90s stumbled with the much-maligned Rocky V, while Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot saw Stallone try to lighten up for a change with these two ill-fated comedies. Guess his attempt to level up with his then-arch rival, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who did a better job in Twins and Kindergarten Cop, both high-profile comedies that made big money at the box office.
Then came Cliffhanger, where Stallone paired with Die Hard 2’s Renny Harlin, and the Die Hard-on-a-mountain action thriller successfully revived the star’s flagging career at the time. But believe it or not, the initial Stallone-Harlin collaboration was supposed to be a different movie altogether, albeit the Die Hard-style concept still intact, except the location was not set in the Rocky Mountains but rather in the midst of a hurricane.
The title was known as Gale Force, which was described as Die Hard in a hurricane action-disaster thriller. The premise would be about an ex-Navy SEAL fighting against a band of modern pirates during a major hurricane disaster in a small South Carolina coastal town, and the idea of having Stallone on board with Harlin in charge of the direction sure sounds like a box office hit-in-the-making.
Carolco Pictures, the prominent independent film studio behind the first three Rambo movies, Total Recall, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, allocated a $40 million budget. By today’s standard, that amount falls under the mid-range budget category, but $40 million in the ‘90s era sat in the realm of a big-budget production. Harlin, in the meantime, was paid $3 million to direct Gale Force. David Chappe, who previously wrote an episode for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe animated series, originally came up with a spec script in 1984. He went over his story for a total of six revisions between November 1987 and April 1989.
His final draft sparked an interest among several studios, resulting in a hot bidding war that ended with Carolco Pictures securing it at a whopping $500,000. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since the studio was known for overspending and accumulating a mountain of debts.
So, Carolco Pictures was actively working on the project from 1989 to 1991, but the production barely got off the ground since more rewrites were required to get everything right on paper. Harlin wanted the story to have more big action sequences in it. At one point, the most notorious rewrite came from Joe Eszterhas, best known for Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct, whose draft radically changed the premise into an erotic thriller involving a love triangle. Obviously, it didn’t work out.
By then, the budget got out of control after Carolco Pictures spent millions just for the script rewrites alone. The project was eventually cancelled just two weeks before production began. That’s a pity, considering the ambitious high-concept potential if Gale Force was materialized.
But looking back at Gale Force, the biggest hurdle would be making the visual effects of the hurricane look convincing enough on the big screen. Keep in mind that CGI wasn’t as widely used as today due to the limitations of its special effects technology, even though there were a handful of filmmakers who managed to achieve the impossible, seen in the likes of James Cameron’s The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and of course, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.
Still, that didn’t stop Stallone and Harlin from working together as they decided to move on with another project titled Cliffhanger, a significantly costlier Die Hard-style action thriller that carried a $70 million budget, $30 million more than what the cancelled Gale Force had. Fortunately, Cliffhanger went on to become a huge box-office hit, grossing $255 million worldwide.
Despite Gale Force being buried and forgotten ever since, the Die Hard in a hurricane concept did manage to find its life somewhere else, such as The Hurricane Heist. Released in 2018 with little fanfare, the heist thriller/disaster movie hybrid starring Toby Kebbell and Maggie Grace flopped at the box office, despite its potential premise about a group of thieves staging a daring bank robbery during an incoming category 5 hurricane. The hurricane elements could also be seen in other movies, namely Geostorm, Crawl, and the climactic third act of The Equalizer 2.
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