Steven Seagal’s “Executive Decision 1996” Death Was Almost More Graphic

Steven Seagal's "Executive Decision 1996" Death Was Almost More Graphic

Steven Seagal’s shock death in “Executive Decision” was originally intended to be gorier. Steven Seagal had a storied life before coming to Hollywood and became an unlikely movie star with 1988’s Above The Law, a Warner Bros action thriller where he played a cop who is also an aikido expert. Seagal’s unusual charisma and the movie’s brutal fights made it a surprise success, with the actor going on to more hits like Marked For Death and the Under Siege franchise, and he was considered an action star on par with Jean Claude Van-Damme at his peak.

His last theatrical success of note was 2001’s Exit Wounds, but in the years that followed nearly all of his projects went straight to DVD, including Urban Justice and Driven To Kill. In 1996 he appeared in Executive Decision, an intense thriller involving a Special Forces team who board a hijacked passenger plane in mid-air. The movie was billed as a two-hander between Kurt Russell’s intelligence officer and Seagal’s Lieutenant Colonel Austin Travis. However, this was an intentional misdirect by the filmmakers, with Seagal’s character shockingly killed off before he even boards the plane.

This scene sees Travis close a hatch to save the passenger plane before his docking tunnel collapses and sucks him out into the sky, but the sequence was planned to be a little gorier. Seagal’s death was always planned to be a shocking moment for audiences, and it was designed by director Stuard Baird (Star Trek: Nemesis) to raise the stakes for the other characters. It’s since been revealed the action star didn’t want to film his Executive Decision death at all when he came time to shooting. He argued his fans would like the scene and that the death wasn’t believable.

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He ended up delaying production over this point, but after reportedly being threatened with a lawsuit over breach of contract, a tamer version of the scene was shot. In retrospect, it’s probably for the best a alternative wasn’t filmed, with Seagal’s sudden demise being more effective with how Executive Decision portrays it now. The actor has essentially avoided dying in most of his work ever since, except for a villain role in 2010’s Machete. While he’s technically defeated by Danny Trejo’s title character, he ends up committing Seppuku, presumably because Seagal didn’t like the idea of being killed by someone else.