Eclectic Pictures and Hollywood Ventures Group are teaming on a “female-driven expansion” of The Expendables franchise, tentatively titled Expendabelles.
Sound familiar? It is. Ever since the first Expendables hit theaters in 2010 and went on to gross north of $100 million — effectively launching a Sylvester Stallone-led franchise that has now produced a total of four movies — a handful of filmmakers have tried to crack a version starring women in the lead roles.
Back in 2014, Legally Blonde helmer Robert Luketic was set to direct a version penned by that film’s scribes, Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah, for Millennium Films that was to center on female operatives who had to pose as call girls to rescue a nuclear scientist being held hostage, a plot that surely would be eviscerated online today.
That version never came to fruition, and nearly a decade later, Millennium’s Jeffrey Greenstein told The Hollywood Reporter that one of the challenges with getting that project off the ground was “trying to find a way to justify why we’d have a woman team.”
The first Expendables starred Stallone alongside the likes of Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke and more. Bruce Willis, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, Glen Powell, Antonio Banderas, Victor Ortiz, and others turned up in later installments.
