With each passing day, the gloriously stupid tagline of “They’ll Die When They’re Dead” is getting more and more fitting for EXPEND4BLES, because there’s surely no chance the band will be getting back together for a fifth outing after the long-awaited fourth installment cratered at the box office.
Fully deserving of its woeful 13 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, the abysmal reunion of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, and the rest of the aging action stars faced an uphill struggle anyway to convince audiences that dusting off a franchise sitting on the shelf for close to a decade was worth making a trip to the theater for, with Lionsgate’s $100 million investment on the production looking very risky.
After three weeks in theaters, director Scott Waugh’s dismal shoot ’em up has barely made it past $27 million in global ticket sales, and that’s not even the worst of it. After just three weeks on the domestic Top 10, the trigger-happy turd has been kicked out by the re-release of a movie that bombed 30 years ago.
Sure, Hocus Pocus might be an undisputed cult classic these days that gets rewatched on an annual basis by millions of devotees, but it still crashed and burned on the big screen first time around. And yet, despite the fact everybody who wants to see it has already seen it at least a dozen times, it still out-earned EXPEND4BLES this past weekend by almost $500,000 to take 10th spot on the rankings, pushing the elder statesmen of action cinema down to 11th.