Expendabelles: All-Female Expendables Spinoff Is Back

The Expendables franchise is getting back in the fight — and this time, the guys are sitting it out. At the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, Eclectic Pictures and Hollywood Ventures Group announced they are teaming up on Expendabelles, an all-female spinoff of the Sylvester Stallone-led action series that has spent more than a decade bouncing around development hell.

The new film will be an origin story set in the late 1990s, during what the producers describe as “the height of Y2K-era tension and geopolitical uncertainty.” Rather than the familiar faces from the main franchise, Expendabelles plans to introduce an entirely new roster of elite female operatives — a “stylized, action-driven cinematic event designed to expand the mythology of the franchise while standing firmly on its own,” according to the filmmakers.

No casting has been announced. Producers are currently in the packaging phase, actively assembling creative talent while in talks with distribution partners and financiers at the festival. But the enthusiasm from the production side is very much there.

“There has always been a strong global appetite for female-driven action franchises, and we believe the time is now to introduce a bold new generation of elite operatives into this universe,” said Eclectic Pictures founder Heidi Jo Markel. “What excites us most is the opportunity to elevate the material by pairing it with top-tier creative talent and delivering a fresh, stylish, adrenaline-fueled experience for worldwide audiences.”

HVG co-founder Glenn Gainor, who will produce alongside Markel, put it this way: “We see this as an opportunity to honor the DNA of what made The Expendables resonate globally, while evolving it in a way that feels both timely and commercially compelling. This is a world audiences know, but we’re introducing them to it in a way they’ve never seen before.”

A Very Long Road to Get Here

If Expendabelles sounds familiar, that’s because it absolutely should. The concept was first floated back in 2012, when trades reported that Milla Jovovich and Gina Carano were being eyed for a female-led companion piece to the main franchise. By 2014, the project had taken firmer shape — Legally Blonde director Robert Luketic was attached to helm a script by that film’s writers Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah, with Sigourney Weaver set to star. That version centered on female operatives who had to pose as call girls to rescue a hostage nuclear scientist. It was supposed to start shooting in early 2015.

It never happened. Weaver eventually confirmed she’d departed the project. The Expendables 3 underperformed at the box office, and the spinoff quietly died. Years later, Millennium Films’ Jeffrey Greenstein told The Hollywood Reporter that one of the core challenges had been “trying to find a way to justify why we’d have a woman team.” Which, yes, is exactly as baffling a statement as it sounds.

Stallone himself offered his own colorful take on the concept back when he was promoting The Expendables 3 in 2014. “With The Expendabelles, we’re in uncharted waters,” he said. “To put all women together, will that really work? Do you have to put in some women that are actually really known to be tough — other MMA fighters? Or are the Expendabelles really part of a divorce, with Sigourney Weaver as my wife and she’s inherited half of the Expendables?”

The good news is that the new version has quietly dropped the call-girl plot and the franchise-divorce brainstorming entirely.

Where the Franchise Stands Now

The four Expendables films have collectively earned over $855 million at the global box office — a genuinely impressive run built on the novelty of cramming every action icon of the ’80s and ’90s into one movie. The original 2010 film brought together Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, and Mickey Rourke. Later sequels added Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, and more.

But the franchise hit a wall with Expend4bles in 2023. The fourth installment — which did include Megan Fox as a female team member — was a critical and commercial bomb, and talk of a fifth mainline film has gone quiet. Lionsgate acquired the franchise rights late last year (the same deal that brought in a new John Rambo film starring Noah Centineo), and Expendabelles appears to be the studio’s first real move with the IP.

The female-led action space hasn’t exactly been kind to Hollywood recently. Jessica Chastain’s The 355, which assembled an all-star cast including Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, and Diane Kruger, grossed just $27 million worldwide when it landed in 2022. The 2019 Charlie’s Angels reboot pulled in only $73 million globally on a roughly $48 million budget. Those results loom large over any conversation about this genre.

That said, the failure of those films likely had more to do with execution and marketing than the simple fact of women being in the lead roles — and a franchise with built-in global name recognition is a different proposition than launching something from scratch.

The executive producer team behind Expendabelles includes HVG co-founder Sandy Climan, Thirteenth Studios’ Joe Smith, Nelly Kim, Kroll, Stephen R. Foreht, and John Yarincik. The project was originally conceived alongside Millennium by Markel, Patrick Muldoon, and Julie Kroll.

As for who should actually be in this thing? The internet already has opinions. Charlize Theron, Michelle Yeoh, Kate Beckinsale, Danai Gurira — the list of women who could absolutely carry an action franchise writes itself. The question is whether the producers can actually close the deals and get cameras rolling before this one disappears into development limbo for a third time.