Presidents in Peril! Again!

Did you catch Antwoine Fuqua's Die Hard at the White House picture Olympus Has Fallen earlier this year? If you missed it, don't worry, you'll get the chance to see it this summer when it's re-released as...

White House Down - And did you notice that Roland Emmerich, the dude making this Casa Blanca carnage picture, is the guy responsible for blowing up the White House once before in Independence Day? WTF?

Man, when we put our presidents in peril, or generally monkey around with their well-being, we like to do it more than once, just to make sure we get it right.

Which is why -

John Carpenter's Escape From New York, which featured Donald Pleasence as the held for ransom commander in chief, may have sounded familiar in 1981. 'Cause the year before Kurt Russell had the job of saving the presidential bacon, it was...

William Shatner working on behalf of prez Hal Holbrook. in Kidnapping of the President directed by George Mendeluk.

Or sometimes it's a director who is given the Washington D.C. beat, and catches a hallowed halls of power bug. For instance, John Frankenheimer gave us two different paranoid thrillers about presidential coups  - The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 and

Seven Days in May only two years later.

Or maybe you're Wolfgang Peterson and you had a hit when you put aging action star Clint Eastwood between a bullet and its democratically elected target in In the Line of Fire, so next time out, you remove the body guard and go full retard with...

Harrison Ford as the man himself getting all badass (cause hey, everybody flipped for Bill Pullman putting on the presidential-sky-jockey rig in Independence Day, right?) in Air Force One, or, as I'm sure it was pitched, Die Hard on a plane. After all Executive Order and Passenger 57 could've been huger hits if they'd just added presidents. Or even better - Snakes On a Plane!

Maybe Clint Eastwood and Peterson were trying to Oval-office-out-do-each-other, cause after their In the Line of Fire collaboration, the same year Petes is giving us Air Force One, Easts is directing Absolute Power, in which the President is unknowingly witnessed committing a crime - which, when you take into account that it's Gene Hackman as the man, kinda sounds like Roger Donaldson's way more excellent No Way Out where Hackman plays the Defense Secretary who is unknowingly witnessed accidentally killing his mistress - but yeah, he's not the president, so it's really more like...

Murder at 1600, Dwight H. Little's who-dunnit at the White House featuring Wesley Snipes goin all, 'Hey, Peterson, it's 1997 and you're ripping off Passenger 57 with a presidential twist? Well two can play that game and I'm gonna poison the presidential well with this turkey.'

Yeah I'm sure that's how it went. Anyway, if there's going to be any more presidential pictures plummeting toward a playhouse near you, er, me, I'd like to formally request of the powers that be, that we stick to a little classic science-fauxion next time with an adaptation of this recently e-released Emerson LaSalle title There Are Aliens Behind Uranus, Mr. President, and if they need to do a two-fer Harry Truman Vs. The Aliens is all ready to go.