How Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s Red One pays subtle tribute to Bruce Willis

Dwayne Johnson stars alongside Chris Evans in new Christmas action-comedy about a kidnapped Santa Claus

Dwayne Johnson’s heavily derided new Christmas movie Red One features several tributes to classic holiday movies as well as one subtle Easter egg to Bruce Willis’s 1988 Die Hard.

Red One, which is out now in theaters, is about a kidnapped Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons), whose top operative (Johnson) must team up with an accomplished tracker (Chris Evans) to find him and save Christmas.

While it couldn’t be more different in tone from Willis’s action thriller about a New York City police officer caught up in a terrorist attack on Christmas Eve, Red One manages to recreate a popular scene featured in the first film of the Die Hard franchise.

At the end of the movie, a montage sees Simmons’s Santa army crawling through air vents to distribute gifts to houses. This moment appears to be a reference to one of Die Hard’s most memorable scenes in which Willis’s John McClane is forced to crawl through the vents of Nakotami Plaza to escape Alexander Godunov’s East German terrorist, Karl Vreski.

As he’s making his way through the tunnel, John flips open a lighter and says the iconic line: “Come out to the coast, have a few laughs.”

The homage likely comes from Johnson and director Jake Kasdan’s love for Die Hard. Kasdan recently called Die Hard a “great” movie that “stands up any time of year.”

Bruce Willis’s John McClane crawls through the vents of Nakotami Plaza in ‘Die Hard’ (20th Century Studios)

Johnson’s 2018 film Skyscraper, meanwhile, was also inspired by Willis’s Eighties thriller.

“I wanted to make a film that paid homage and respect to the classic action movies that inspired me and entire generations — Die Hard to Towering Inferno to The Fugitive,” Johnson told Cinema Blend at the time.

The Moana actor also co-starred alongside Willis in 2013’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation. During a U.K. press conference for the action sci-fi, Johnson praised Willis, calling him “the ultimate man’s man... Bruce and I have been buddies for a long time.”

Willis, 69, has since retired from acting in 2022 after he was diagnosed with aphasia — a brain condition that impacts a person’s cognitive abilities. The following year, his family announced he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia FTD.

“We now have a more specific diagnosis: frontotemporal dementia (known as FTD),” his family said in a statement in 2023. “Unfortunately, challenges with communication are just one symptom of the disease Bruce faces. While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis.”

In October, The Substance star Demi Moore, who was married to Willis from 1987 to 2000, shared that he was in a “stable place” amid his battle with dementia.

“You know, I’ve said this before. The disease is what the disease is. And I think you have to be in real deep acceptance of what that is,” Moore said during a discussion at the 2024 Hamptons International Film Festival. “But for where he’s at, he is stable.”

Moore and Willis share three children: Rumer, 36, Scout, 33, and Tallulah, 30. In 2009, the Sixth Sense actor later remarried Emma Heming Willis, with whom he shares two daughters: Mabel, 12, and Evelyn, 10.