Die Hard is back with a vengeance… and we’re not just talking about Die Hard 5. For some reason, there are suddenly a handful of Hollywood projects in development right now that are all being modeled on the familiar Die Hard formula (ie. good guy trapped in a building taken over by terrorists). What’s more, two of these upcoming movies are both set at the White House. Last week Deadline reported that Roland Emmerich had signed on to direct White House Down for Sony (a title clearly playing on Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down), based on a $3 million spec script written by James Vanderbilt (The Amazing Spider-Man). Now this week Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) is in talks to direct Olympus Has Fallen, a similar project for Nu Image/Millennium. Which one will hit theatres first?

According to THR, Olympus was actually the first to get picked up, but it wasn’t really in active development until Sony announced their competing project. Now it’s getting fast-tracked with a projected June start date. It already has a potential star in Gerard Butler, who was attached as of last month to play the Secret Service agent tasked with single-handedly saving the President. The script was written by first-time scribes Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt.

Plot details for White House Down are not yet clear, but it seems a safe bet that they are pretty damn similar. If they’re smart, they’ll rewrite White House Down to feature the President himself as the hero a la Air Force One (which, itself, topped off a whole decade’s worth of Die Hard clones). Either way, it’s yet another pair of competing Hollywood projects to add to an already well-established list. Are you excited about the return of the Die Hard formula? Which of these two competing projects are you most interested in?