Twilight of the '80s Action Gods

For nearly a decade and a half, The Expendables has been a study in survival against the odds. The films have provided steady work for Hollywood’s aging lunks—an affirmative action-hero program, if you will, allowing yesteryear’s stars to continue flexing pecs and spraying bullets, deep into midlife and beyond. The original Expendables (2010) featured a phalanx of actors, professional wrestlers, and martial artists—Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Gary Daniels, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Eric Roberts, and an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger—whose combined age, if I’ve crunched the numbers right, totaled 616. Subsequent films pulled in Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford—more or less every leading man who trudged through an action-thriller in the 1980s and ’90s.

Conceptually, The Expendables was shrewd. It was a throwback, aimed at a presumably vast audience that yearned for the blockbusters of yore. Early returns were good. The debut movie and its 2012 follow-up earned sizeable grosses and the kinds of negative reviews—complaints about leaden dialogue and too many explosions—that signal to fans “This movie is awesome.” There were spinoffs: Expendables comic books, video games, a deal for a Bollywood remake, and plans for an all-female version, The Expendabelles, whose cast, it was rumored, would include Sigourney Weaver, Milla Jovovich, and, for some reason, Meryl Streep.

But The Expendables 3 (2014) sagged at the box office, earning just $39 million domestically. And where the first three films appeared like clockwork every two years, it took nine years for Expend4bles to materialize. It landed in theaters with a thud louder than any heard in the movie itself, which is saying something, tallying a paltry $8 million in its first weekend. The second weekend brought worse numbers: about $2.5 million. In recent days, the internet has been abuzz with speculation that the dismal showing spells the franchise’s demise.