It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when Bruce Willis seemed to lose any and all interest in his career and start phoning it in, but the actor’s slide from the very top of the A-list to bottom of the barrel VOD purgatory has been going on for close to a decade now. The 65 year-old turns up, goes through the motions, picks up his paycheck and heads home, which is a far cry from when he was one of cinema’s biggest stars.
In the last eight years alone, Willis has shown up in no less than 30 movies, and only in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and Rian Johnson’s Looper has he given a memorable performance. Fifteen of them have gone straight to video, and outside of franchise turns in A Good Day to Die Hard, G.I Joe: Retaliation, Red 2 and Glass, the rest have bombed at the box office.
At this stage, it would take a Herculean effort to arrest his descent into mediocrity, but we’re now hearing from our sources – the same ones that told us She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel shows were in the works for Disney Plus before either was officially announced – that Marvel Studios want Willis to join the superhero series in a villainous role.
According to our intel, Marvel would like for the Armageddon star to play an agent working in the upper echelons of S.W.O.R.D., the organization set to be introduced in WandaVision. Willis’ unnamed character would turn out to be secretly doing the bidding of a much bigger bad pulling the strings behind the scenes, though. Which could open to door to recurring appearances in the future.
Joining the biggest game in town is one way to get your career back on track, and if playing a government official with ulterior motives in the MCU is good enough for Robert Redford, then surely it’s good enough for Bruce Willis. For now, though, we’ll just have to wait and see if Marvel can rope him in.
