What Will The Expendables 4 Make This Weekend?

Boxoffice Pro has put out its last projection for The Expendables 4's debut--anticipating a gross of $10-$15 million in the movie's first three days of North American release, which, of course, is in line with the weak gross they have predicted over the past month (a final take of under $40 million, maybe even under $25 million).

This seems all too predictable, and not just because this is a fourth installment in a never-better-than-second-string action series coming out almost a decade after the poorly received third installment at a time in which franchise films like these just keep crashing and burning (as so many bigger films from more robust franchises did this summer), though it is plenty for this film, or any other, to have against it. There is, too, the shaky foundation for the franchise. The Expendables, like pretty much everything else in Sylvester Stallone career these past two decades (Rocky VI, Creed I-III, Rambo IV and V, etc., etc.) has been about milking the public's nostalgia for his earlier film career, with the nostalgia for the '80s action film that the original The Expendables was all about now that much more remote in the past, that much fainter a draw. (I will say it once more--Top Gun: Maverick was the exception, not the rule, the beneficiary of breathless media cheer-leading amid a summer of very weak competition, as underlined by its failure to deliver much of a boost for Tom Cruise's subsequent Mission: Impossible film , and the way that even bigger '80s phenomenon, Indiana Jones, did this past summer.)

Indeed, The Expendables, which came out in 2010, is now so far behind us that, while sequels invariably trade on nostalgia for those films to which they are follow-ups, the movie is trading on outright nostalgia for yesteryear's nostalgia--nostalgia for back when people were enjoying '80s nostalgia. This seems to me symbolized by the casting of Megan Fox in the film. Megan Fox, basically, got her moment in the spotlight in the piece of '80s nostalgia that was The Transformers--and after many years of not being seen very much by very many people in actual films, here she is, appealing to our nostalgia for when she was participating in a piece of '80s nostalgia. It all feels rather anemic, such that I see no grounds to expect this movie to surprise us with a better-than-expected opening, better-than-expected legs--let alone the very-much-better-than-expected performance required to turn this $100 million movie into a money-maker for its backers.