Having come mighty close to finishing itself off at the third time of asking after the boneheaded decision to opt for a PG-13 rating, the disastrous critical and commercial reception to the fourth installment has almost certainly hammered the final nail into the coffin of The Expendables.
After a nine-year absence, Sylvester Stallone and his aging band of mercenaries returned to the blood-soaked and bullet-riddled stylings of the first two chapters, only to find themselves being panned into the ground by critics and completely ignored by audiences, with the $100 million blockbuster already on course to end up as one of the year’s biggest flops.
With that in mind, a fifth outing for the mainline saga is a fairly unrealistic prospect, so you can pretty much rule long-touted female-led spin-off The Expendabelles from ever happening. If it was going to come to life, it would have done so by now, but producer Les Weldon did his best not to admit it during an interview with ComicBook.
“I am not sure, that’s, uh — there’s been talk. Let me just put it that way. It hasn’t really moved any closer to fruition. And I tell you, scheduling these kind of movies is incredibly difficult. And even for us, it happened to be a little bit easier — whatever, 2008 to 2009 when we did the first one — simply because we had an idea of the action stars we wanted to bring in, and they all were eager to jump in and participate.”
Expend4bles has tanked so spectacularly that it’s going to be a great deal more surprising if Expendable5 and Expenda6les even get mentioned in passing, but there can’t be many folks out there who ever realistically expected Expendabelles to happen. After all, it’s been over a decade since it was first announced, and despite hiring Robert Luketic to direct in early 2014, that’s about as far as it got.
