The entire point of turning a successful movie into a franchise is to capitalize on what worked the first time around, giving audiences more of what they initially paid to see, except painted on an increasingly larger canvas.
Obviously, nobody decided to read that memo when The Expendables 3 was in development, because the disappointing threequel cast aside the two biggest selling points of the entire series in a desperate attempt to appeal to a younger audience, and thus earn more money at the box office.
The Expendables was created solely for the purpose of seeing a stacked roster of action icons tool up, furrow their brows, spit out terrible one-liners, and mow down small armies of disposable henchmen without a care in the world. Sure, critical acclaim was never the order of the day, but the first two installments were a hell of a lot of fun.
Naturally, the threequel decided that a PG-13 rating was the way to go, eliminating foul language and bloodshed from a property that existed solely to trigger nostalgia for the genre’s 1980s heyday. Mel Gibson, Antonio Banderas, and Wesley Snipes may have upped the veteran count, but who cared about what Ronda Rousey, Kellan Lutz, Glen Powell, and Victor Oritz brought to the table?
The end result was the lowest-grossing and worst-reviewed Expendables adventure yet, although it has been a reliable performer on streaming. As per FlixPatrol, Barney Ross and the gang are back on the platform’s most-watched list, but we can only hope the creative team has learned their lesson when it comes to the impending fourth entry.