Bruce Willis built a career out of moments that stick in your head forever. Barefoot in Nakatomi Plaza. Bloodied in a white tank top. Staring down an asteroid. Walking through bullets like he had somewhere better to be. Even when the movie around him got ridiculous, Willis usually gave you an image you never forgot. I mean, I’m sure as hell we all can’t forget Color of Night.
The same thing goes for his turn as the bad guy in a certain 1997 film.
What people remember about The Jackal is Bruce Willis changing disguises like he’s trying to beat Val Kilmer in The Saint at his own game. They remember Richard Gere committing hard to an Irish accent that sounds like someone’s after his Lucky Charms. They remember Sidney Poitier bringing so much dignity that it feels like he wandered onto the wrong set by accident. And, of course, they remember Jack Black getting absolutely erased by a remote-controlled cannon in the middle of a field.
That alone would make today’s film worth talking about.
Then you start looking behind the scenes.
You find a remake that barely resembles the novel that inspired it. A battle over the title before filming was even finished. A screenplay that kept changing during production. A composer who nearly took his name off the movie. One scene that sparked controversy before the film even reached theaters. And Bruce Willis giving one of the rare villain performances of his career while wearing enough wigs to keep Spirit Halloween in business.
That movie was The Jackal.
No, not Jackyl, the band where the lead singer obliterated Tom Green’s desk with his awesomely dumbass chainsaw guitar. This Jackal had a different kind of ridiculous weapon, and if you’ve seen the movie, you already know exactly where it’s headed.
So grab your fake passport, climb into the murder van, and let’s find out what happened to The Jackal.
FROM BESTSELLING NOVEL TO CLASSIC THRILLER
Before we get into all of the meat and potatoes of the film, let’s dial it all the way back to the early 1970s. Author Frederick Forsyth didn’t set out to write a conventional thriller when he published The Day of the Jackal in 1971. Before becoming a novelist, he’d worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, and you can feel that background on nearly every page. The story moves with the precision of an investigation, paying close attention to details that most writers would’ve skipped.
The novel follows a professional assassin hired by the French militant group known as the OAS to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. His real name is never revealed. Everyone simply knows him as the Jackal.
Several publishers reportedly passed on the manuscript because readers already knew de Gaulle survived. Forsyth understood that suspense didn’t disappear just because history had already written the ending. You keep turning the pages because you want to see how the Jackal builds a new identity, crosses another border, acquires another weapon, and stays one step ahead of the investigators closing in around him.
That approach turned The Day of the Jackal into an international bestseller, and it didn’t take long for Hollywood to notice.
Director Fred Zinnemann brought The Day of the Jackal to the screen in 1973 with Edward Fox cast as the assassin. If you watch it today, you’ll probably be surprised by how restrained it feels compared to most thrillers. Zinnemann trusted the material enough to let the tension build naturally. Edward Fox barely raises his voice, rarely shows emotion, and almost disappears into the crowd. That’s exactly why he works. He doesn’t look like someone you’d expect to carry out one of the most famous assassinations in history.
The movie became a critical and commercial success, earning an Oscar nomination and cementing its place as one of the great political thrillers. For more than twenty years, Hollywood left it alone.
Eventually, somebody decided it was time for another, pardon the pun, shot.
Universal wasn’t interested in making the same movie again. The studio wanted something that reflected the political landscape of the late ’90s, and that meant replacing almost everything surrounding the assassin. The Cold War had ended. Charles de Gaulle had been gone for decades. The OAS wasn’t exactly a household name anymore. If the movie was going to connect with modern audiences, the story needed a different backdrop.
Screenwriter Chuck Pfarrer was brought in to figure that out.
Pfarrer had lived a life that already sounded like a movie. Before writing screenplays, he served as a Navy SEAL. After leaving the military, he built a career writing action films like Navy SEALs, Darkman, Hard Target, and later Virus. If you needed someone who understood military operations, covert missions, and dangerous people carrying expensive weapons, he was an easy choice.
His version kept the central idea of an anonymous assassin accepting a contract to eliminate a powerful target. Everything around that premise changed.
French extremists became Russian organized crime. The French investigation became a joint operation between the FBI and Russian intelligence. Instead of protecting Charles de Gaulle, the authorities were trying to stop the murder of a prominent American political figure.
The movie opens in Moscow, where FBI Deputy Director Carter Preston joins Major Valentina Koslova during a raid against Russian mob boss Terek Murad. The operation leaves Murad’s younger brother dead, and Murad responds by hiring the most elusive contract killer he can find.
Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody knows where he’ll strike. The FBI doesn’t even know who’s been marked for death. Their only lead is Declan Mulqueen, a former IRA sniper who crossed paths with the assassin years earlier.
But there’s one catch.
Declan is serving time in an American prison.
The FBI offers him a deal. Help them identify the Jackal and stop the assassination, and they’ll consider reducing his sentence.
It’s a strong setup, and you can understand why Universal believed they had the ingredients for a hit. Bruce Willis would play the titular villain. Richard Gere would play the man trying to track him down. Sidney Poitier would anchor the investigation.
The script, however, never really settled down.
Kevin Jarre reportedly came in for uncredited rewrite work during development. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Jarre wrote Glory and the original screenplay for Tombstone. His contributions reportedly expanded Declan Mulqueen’s role, giving Richard Gere far more to do than simply point investigators in the right direction.
Declan now carried years of emotional baggage. He had history with the IRA, unfinished business with a woman named Isabella, and a personal connection to the Jackal that turned the chase into something much more intimate.
Those additions gave Gere a meatier character, but they also pulled the movie in a different direction. The original story stayed focused on an assassin and the investigators closing in around him. The remake added Russian mob business, FBI bureaucracy, international intelligence agencies, old romances, redemption arcs, and enough subplots that the story occasionally struggled to decide which one mattered most. Director Michael Caton-Jones inherited all of it.
By that point, Caton-Jones had earned a reputation directing films like This Boy’s Life, Rob Roy, and the movie Carstotally ripped off, Doc Hollywood. Character-driven dramas were his specialty, which made him an interesting choice for a globe-spanning studio thriller. Years later, he admitted the screenplay still had problems when production began. Rewrites continued, scenes changed, and parts of the movie had to be reshaped in the editing room. You can certainly feel those adjustments while you’re watching.
Some scenes play like a grounded political thriller. Others lean into suspense. Then Bruce Willis starts assembling a remote-controlled cannon inside a minivan, and the movie suddenly remembers it’s a late-’90s action film. That balancing act followed The Jackal all the way through production.
However, the next battle had nothing to do with the script. It was over the title itself.
THE TITLE FIGHT
Universal originally intended to release the movie as The Day of the Jackal.
That lasted until the people behind the original found out.
Frederick Forsyth wasn’t interested in seeing his novel used to market a movie that had changed so much of the story. Director Fred Zinnemann and producer John Woolf felt the same way. They argued that audiences would assume they were getting a faithful remake when, in reality, the similarities mostly stopped with the central idea of an anonymous assassin hired to eliminate a high-profile target.
You can understand where they were coming from.
The original revolved around an attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. The remake shifted the action to the United States, replaced French politics with Russian organized crime, introduced entirely new characters, and built an action thriller around Bruce Willis and Richard Gere.
Universal eventually backed down and shortened the title to The Jackal. The studio also made it clear the movie was only loosely inspired by Forsyth’s novel rather than presenting it as a direct remake.
From that point on, The Jackal was always going to live in the shadow of one of the greatest thrillers ever made. Critics weren’t going to judge it as a standalone action movie. They were going to compare it to The Day of the Jackal. That comparison showed up in almost every review.
Before audiences could decide whether they liked Bruce Willis’s version of the assassin, reviewers were already asking why Hollywood felt the need to remake the original at all.
Universal was betting that Bruce Willis could answer that question.
BRUCE WILLIS PLAYS THE BAD GUY
Casting Bruce Willis as the Jackal was probably the movie’s smartest decision.
By 1997, Willis had already established himself as one of Hollywood’s biggest action stars. Die Hard made him the everyman hero audiences loved rooting for, and movies like The Last Boy Scout, Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, and The Fifth Element only strengthened that reputation.
We were used to Bruce Willis saving the day. Instead, he became the person everyone else was trying to stop.
The Jackal doesn’t waste time delivering speeches or explaining himself. He accepts a contract, prepares for the job, and removes anyone who gets in the way. Whether that person is a witness, a weapons dealer, or someone he spent the night with doesn’t matter. Once they’ve served their purpose, they’re expendable.
Willis plays him with a confidence that feels completely different from John McClane. The sarcasm is mostly gone. The charm becomes another disguise. Every conversation feels calculated, as though he’s already thinking three moves ahead.
The disguises became one of the movie’s biggest selling points.
Since nobody knows what the Jackal actually looks like, he constantly changes his appearance. Whether that worked depends on how easily you recognize Bruce Willis.
You always know it’s him.
The fun comes from seeing which member of the Village People shows up next. Sometimes he’s a businessman, sometimes he’s a construction worker, and sometimes he’s a police officer.
Then there’s a disguise that ended up creating one of the movie’s biggest controversies.
THE GLAAD CONTROVERSY
One of the Jackal’s identities takes him into a gay bar, where he meets Douglas, played by Stephen Spinella. He charms him, earns his trust, and quietly turns Douglas’s apartment into a temporary base of operations.
The sequence attracted attention months before The Jackal reached theaters. In 1997, mainstream audiences weren’t used to seeing Bruce Willis, one of the biggest action stars in the world, kiss another man. Studio executives reportedly wanted the moment removed, while Willis fought to keep it in the film. For him, the scene showed how easily the Jackal could use intimacy as another disguise.
The larger controversy began during early test screenings, when some audience members reportedly cheered after Douglas was killed. GLAAD criticized the reaction, and entertainment media director Chaz Bono contacted producer Sean Daniel with concerns about how the scene was playing. Douglas was the movie’s only openly gay character, and his sudden murder was landing like a crowd-pleasing punchline instead of a disturbing example of the Jackal’s cruelty.
Universal took the criticism seriously and reworked the sequence before release. In the earlier version, the Jackal simply killed Douglas while cleaning up another loose end. The theatrical cut added a television news report that reveals the Jackal’s face while Douglas is standing nearby. Once Douglas recognizes him, the assassin knows his cover has been compromised.
That small change gives the murder a clearer reason within the story. Douglas has seen too much, and the Jackal responds the same way he always does when someone becomes a threat. He doesn’t hesitate, explain himself, or show any remorse. He simply removes the problem.
Willis plays that ruthlessness with chilling calm. The Jackal can build a relationship, imitate affection, and then erase someone the moment they’re no longer useful. If you want to see that same cold efficiency pushed into completely absurd territory, though, you need to visit the scene everyone remembers.
Unfortunately for Jack Black, he’s standing in exactly the wrong place when it happens.
JACK BLACK, THE CANNON, AND THE SCENE EVERYBODY REMEMBERS
Before School of Rock, King Kong, and Kung Fu Panda, Jack Black was still building his career one supporting role at a time. You’d seen him pop up in movies like Demolition Man, Waterworld, The Cable Guy, and Airborne (aka one of the greatest movies ever), but he wasn’t a household name yet.
Then The Jackal gave him just a little bit of screen time, but it was more than enough.
Black plays Ian Lamont, a firearms expert hired to build a custom weapon for the Jackal. At first, it looks like another routine job. Lamont doesn’t know who his client really is, and he certainly doesn’t realize he’s helping construct the centerpiece of an assassination.
The weapon itself tells you everything you need to know about how far this remake drifted from its source material.
In the 1973 film, the Jackal commissions a specially built rifle designed to be concealed inside a crutch. It’s elegant, compact, and exactly what you’d expect from a professional assassin trying to stay invisible.
Bruce Willis goes in a very different direction.
His Jackal builds a massive remote-controlled machine gun hidden inside the back of a minivan. The weapon can be aimed using cameras mounted around the vehicle, allowing him to fire from hundreds of feet away while sitting safely behind the wheel.
Once Lamont finishes assembling the gun, he realizes his customer isn’t planning to use it at a shooting range. He asks for more money to keep quiet. Before handing over the cash, though, he wants to test the weapon.
Lamont walks into an open field holding a pack of cigarettes while explaining how accurate the gun is. The Jackal powers up the targeting system, centers the crosshairs, and squeezes the trigger.
A split second later, Jack Black is vaporized in a cloud of dirt and shredded metal.
The sequence immediately became one of the film’s signature moments because nobody saw it coming. Black wasn’t famous enough for audiences to expect him to survive, but he also wasn’t unknown enough to assume he’d vanish after a single scene.
The effects still hold up surprisingly well, too. Rather than relying on early CGI, the production combined practical effects, pyrotechnics, squibs, and carefully planned camera work to sell the impact.
It’s completely ridiculous, and one of the coolest things in the movie.
BRUCE WILLIS AND RICHARD GERE CLASH BEHIND THE SCENES
The tension between the Jackal and Declan Mulqueen didn’t stay on the screen.
Bruce Willis and Richard Gere reportedly had a difficult relationship during production, and director Michael Caton-Jones later described a lunch where their political differences turned into a heated argument. The two actors came from very different viewpoints, and the conversation apparently became intense enough that the bad blood carried beyond the meal.
That tension may explain why Willis and Gere spend surprisingly little time together for two stars sharing top billing. Their characters are chasing each other across the entire movie, yet most of the story keeps them apart until the final stretch. That’s partly built into the premise, though it also meant Caton-Jones could film large sections without placing both actors in the same room.
Reports later claimed that Willis and Gere had no desire to work together again after The Jackal. Since neither actor appears to have given a detailed public account of the feud, it’s safer to describe the relationship as strained rather than present every rumor as fact.
Whatever happened between them, the friction gives the movie an extra layer. Willis plays the Jackal as cold and remote, while Gere brings restless energy to Declan. They feel like men who’d rather be anywhere else than near each other, which happens to work perfectly for the characters.
Sidney Poitier, meanwhile, had the unenviable job of standing between all that star power and making the production feel like a serious political thriller.
SIDNEY POITIER HOLDS EVERYTHING TOGETHER
While Bruce Willis spends the movie changing identities and Richard Gere chases him across multiple countries, Sidney Poitier quietly becomes the film’s anchor in his final theatrical film.
Poitier plays FBI Deputy Director Carter Preston with the kind of calm authority that only comes from decades of experience. He never tries to outshine the other actors. He doesn’t need a flashy speech or an emotional breakdown to command your attention.
By the time The Jackal entered production, Poitier had already become one of the most respected actors in Hollywood history. He’d won an Academy Award for Lilies of the Field, broken barriers throughout his career, and earned a reputation for bringing intelligence and dignity to nearly every role he accepted.
His presence gave The Jackal something it desperately needed.
The movie spends so much time jumping between international locations, changing disguises, introducing new suspects, and juggling different agencies that Preston becomes the audience’s constant. Whenever the investigation starts feeling scattered, Poitier brings it back under control. This grounded approach makes Bruce Willis’s increasingly elaborate assassination plans feel just plausible enough to keep you invested.
Eventually, though, production headaches caught up with the movie in a place audiences never see: the editing room.
And that’s where another battle began.
THE SCORE THAT ALMOST FELL APART
Once filming wrapped, you’d think the hard part was over.
It wasn’t.
Director Michael Caton-Jones reunited with composer Carter Burwell after working together on This Boy’s Life and Rob Roy. Burwell already had an outstanding reputation thanks to his collaborations with the Coen brothers on films like Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, and Fargo. If you wanted someone who could write intelligent, atmospheric music, he was one of the best people you could call.
However, the partnership didn’t survive The Jackal.
Years later, Burwell shared his side of the story on his website, and he was remarkably candid about the experience. He admitted he never fully understood why Hollywood wanted to remake The Day of the Jackal in the first place. Then the movie ran into a problem that every editor dreads.
The studio felt it wasn’t moving fast enough. As they say, “We’ll fix it in post!”
That’s a difficult note to solve with music.
Burwell rewrote cues, adjusted tempos, and tried different approaches, but he eventually realized something frustrating. Every attempt to make the movie feel faster somehow made it feel even slower.
Producer Danny Saber eventually came in to remix portions of the score, adding a more contemporary sound that leaned into the late-’90s action aesthetic. Burwell later said electric guitar riffs had been layered over sections of his music, changing the tone he’d originally intended. He was unhappy enough that he seriously considered removing his name from the film altogether.
He ultimately decided against it, but the experience ended his working relationship with Michael Caton-Jones.
The soundtrack follows that same philosophy.
There are some movies where the soundtrack is arguably better than the film, and this one is no exception. The soundtrack is packed with artists who defined the era, including Massive Attack, The Prodigy, Moby, Fatboy Slim, Goldie, Bush, and Primal Scream. If you grew up in the late ’90s, you’ll probably recognize half the track list before the opening credits finish rolling.
Whether you prefer Burwell’s original score or the version that reached theaters, one thing became clear.
Nobody involved seemed to walk away completely satisfied.
RELEASE
The Jackal opened in theaters on November 14, 1997.
Universal had assembled an impressive package. Bruce Willis was one of the biggest stars in the world. Richard Gere remained a reliable box office draw. Sidney Poitier brought instant credibility, and the marketing leaned heavily into Willis playing against type.
The Jackal opened at number one during its first weekend and eventually earned nearly $160 million worldwide against a reported budget of around $60 million. Those numbers didn’t turn it into the next Die Hard, but they were strong enough to make the film a financial success.
Critics weren’t convinced.
Many reviews compared the film directly to the 1973 adaptation, which was exactly the comparison Universal had hoped to avoid after changing the title. Roger Ebert gave the film two stars, calling it entertaining in places but weighed down by an overcomplicated story. Other critics praised Willis’s performance while questioning why the remake had drifted so far from Frederick Forsyth’s novel.
Richard Gere’s accent became an easy target and was even nominated at the 1997 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for worst accent. Jon Voight ended up taking the prize for Anaconda.
Over the years, the movie found another audience on cable television.
You’d be flipping channels late at night, land on The Jackal, tell yourself you’d only watch a few minutes, and then suddenly Bruce Willis was trying on another disguise while Richard Gere chased him through another city.
It became one of those movies.
Maybe you couldn’t remember every detail of the plot, but you definitely remembered Jack Black’s scene.
THE JACKAL FINDS NEW LIFE
The story didn’t end in 1997.
More than fifty years after Frederick Forsyth published The Day of the Jackal, the novel returned once again, this time as a television series starring Eddie Redmayne.
Instead of building a larger action movie, the series leaned back into the methodical style that made the novel famous. Surveillance, planning, patience, and tradecraft took center stage again, giving viewers a chance to spend far more time with the assassin than either film ever could.
Critics embraced the series, audiences responded, and it quickly earned a second season.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE JACKAL?
Looking back, it’s easy to understand why The Jackal continues to divide audiences. If you wanted another version of The Day of the Jackal, this was never going to satisfy you. The studio wanted a modern thriller built around Bruce Willis at the height of his career, and that’s exactly what it made.
Some of those choices worked beautifully. Bruce Willis delivered one of the most unusual performances of his career… unless you look at North.
Other decisions haven’t aged quite as well.
The screenplay tries to juggle too many ideas, Richard Gere’s accent became almost as famous as the movie itself, and several emotional storylines never receive enough time to fully develop. Even so, The Jackal has outlived plenty of bigger hits from the late ’90s.
And almost everyone remembers the same scene.
Somewhere in the middle of an open field, Jack Black learns a very important lesson. If Bruce Willis asks you to help build a giant remote-controlled cannon… you should probably decline the job.
And that’s what happened to The Jackal.