Topping the box office and still disappointing is a bad sign for a creaking franchise dusted off after a decade and struggling to remain relevant

Dusting off any long-dormant franchise and trying to restore it to former glories has a success rate that could generously be called 50/50, but the jury remains well and truly out on EXEND4BLES after the fourth installment in the action saga managed to disappoint while still topping the box office.

Obviously, the return of Sylvester Stallone and his ragtag bunch of aging action heroes doesn’t hit domestic screens until this coming Friday, where it’s already tracking for the lowest-grossing opening weekend in series history by quite an alarmingly large margin.

There was hope that international audiences would be able to compensate, but an $11 million opening in China isn’t great, even if it was enough to secure the top spot in a lackluster frame all-round. The threequel made a cardinal sin of opting for a PG-13 rating, and when you couple that with a nine-year absence from screens and an ensemble that’s missing the tongue-in-cheek cameos and stunt castings of days gone by, it’s hard to see any other outcome than EXPEND4BLES ending up as the least successful of the quartet.

With an estimated budget of $100 million it was hardly the cheapest thing to produce, either, so the pressure has been placed on the shoulders of action junkies everywhere to ensure the aging roster of icons don’t go out with a whimper. The gloriously stupid tagline states “They’ll Die When They’re Dead,” but there’s a chance the entire Expendables franchise could be killed off imminently if it doesn’t explode out of the blocks this week.