Even though the first three installments combined to earn north of $800 million at the box office and carved out a substantial fandom among genre junkies, another Expendables movie was never all that high on anybody’s wish-list.
The threequel had already come perilously close to killing the brand altogether after being watered down to a disastrous PG-13 rating, which culminated in the worst reviews and lowest box office the aging band of veterans had experienced to date. At least, until EXPEND4BLES came along to be torn to shreds by critics, with the return of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, and the rest of the gang already in serious danger of going down as one of the year’s biggest flops.
Carrying an estimated price tag of $100 million despite boasting CGI ripped straight out of the 1990s, the incredible negative reactions to the latest chapter have significantly dented its chances of success after EXPEND4BLES could only cobble together $750,000 from Thursday previews.
For comparison, that’s neck-and-neck with very recent catastrophe The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and well below both black comedy thriller The Menu and Idris Elba’s survival story Beast, which combined cost roughly half as much to produce. Even more worryingly, it’s barely ahead of Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, which wound up as one of the century’s heftiest money-losers.
As it turns out, then, if you make a bad movie that not a lot of people were asking for, there’s a distinct chance it’s going to crash, burn, and go down in a ball of box office flames. Who would have thought?