Die Hard 4.0 explodes van in Sweden - Citizens of Stockholm get a little scared. But they ain't Boston.

Event agency Rumble enlisted the help of F/X company Arclight to blow up three vans outside of Stockholm to use as advertising for Die Hard 4.0. Three vans went kabloom, and the lucky sods that got to push the buttons were Twentieth Century Fox Marketing Director Mattias Lundin, a journalist from Metro, and a jammy bastard who won channel 6's "Yippie Ki Yay" competition - reminiscent of the TOUCH/CAST sink a battleship winner. Later the still smouldering wrecks were placed out in the city of Stockholm with some added touches to announce the upcoming Die Hard 4.0 premiere. Much more explosion-porn inside.

Right. I simply have to add all these images - it just looks so dang cool! Why can't I win stuff like this people? Huh? Gimme a remote! I wanna go kabloooOOm!

Client: Mattias Lundin, Twentieth Century Fox
Mediaagency: Ragnar Tingström, Scream

People from Rumble AB who created this big bang were Carl Bofeldt, Creative Director , Jens Peterson Hällefors and Andreas Gustafsson both production leaders.

Sexy explosion photos taken by: Jorge Bravo

Later the vans were spray painted with stuff like "Yippie Ki Yay" and "M... F...", dropped off in the center of the city, surrounded by what looked like police tape and left to make people talk.

And talk they did, some people were scared of these vans, it does after all have a giant ticking clock thing on it - but that's only counting down until the opening night of the film.

So while some think the blown out vans remind them a wee bit too much about last summers robbery spree where armored trucks carrying cash from banks were similarly discarded in the middle of high traffic roads, others say that the spray painted lines from the movie make it pretty clear that it's a stunt from the film. I think it would have been perfect if the tape around it read "DIE HARD 4.0" in the typical "police line do not cross" font (and perhaps it does, I can't tell).

Ulf Göransson, press secretary for the Stockholm police says to Dagens Media in Sweden: "Of course you can have opinions on it [the vans], but since it's not breaking any laws it's not up to the police to have ideas on what constitutes good taste."

Thus, nobody gets arrested for this very realistic advertising stunt, where an actual explosion did happen. Take that, Boston.

Edit: After Fridays and Saturdays car bombings in London and Glasgow, this is how you're supposed to blow up a van.

Rumble AB

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Neaner's picture
Dabitch's picture

Thanks. :)

caffeinegoddess's picture

Great concept! Want to see the movie even more now.

Dabitch's picture

You know, I didn't see this Die Hard until years later when it was suddenly on TV or something, and now that I've seen it I realize how fitting this stunt was.