Bruce Willis told Samuel L. Jackson to find a recurring role "everybody loves" so that he'd be protected from box office flops.
“Bruce told me, 'Hopefully you’ll be able to find a character that, when you make bad movies and they don’t make any money, you can always go back to this character everybody loves,'" Jackson remembers. "He said, ‘Arnold’s got Terminator. Sylvester’s got Rocky and Rambo. I’ve got John McClane.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And it didn’t occur to me until I got that Nick Fury role—and I had a nine-picture deal to be Nick Fury—that, ‘Oh, I’m doing what Bruce said. I’ve got this character now.'”