Home Celebrity Stallone, Schwarzenegger All Star “Expendables 3” Has Been A Box Office Bust

Checking back in with “Expendables 3,” the box office reality is worse than thought. Domestic take is just $29.2 million. Foreign is terrible, at just $21.5 million. Even reliable territories where Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger might still sell tickets didn’t want to see another installment of this former A list adventure.

Adding Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson didn’t do anything, either. No one knows the budget, but it’s got to be minimum $75 million. Salaries and perks for this group–those four stars plus the second level, etc– would guarantee that. “Expendables 3” should have been a payday movie. But many things went wrong.

Bruce Willis was the smart one here. He smelled a turkey and declined to join in. Stallone’s been talking a new female “Expendables” but at this point maybe he should move on to a new project.

Share and Enjoy !

Author
Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News, where he created the Fox411 column. His movie reviews are carried by Rotten Tomatoes, and he is a member of both the movie and TV branches of the Critics Choice Awards. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications over the years including New York Magazine, where he wrote the Intelligencer column in the mid 90s and covered the OJ Simpson trial, and Fox News (when it wasn't so crazy) where he covered Michael Jackson. He is also the writer and co-producer of "Only the Strong Survive," a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals, directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.
6 replies to this post
  1. I won’t go to see another Stallone or Ahnold movie since they both came out with anti-gun statements/sentiments. Maybe a backlash has something to do with E3 crashing? Even people who don’t really care about the Second Amendment can still be offended by the hypocrisy of these two making a mint off violence and shoot-em-ups, yet coming out against gun ownership by law-abiding Americans.

  2. The movie leaked to the internet before release and was illegally downloaded over 2 million times. I think that had more to do with the box office performance than anything else. It was actually the best movie of the series, in my opinion.

  3. Isn’t the international gross $50,400,000? That’s more than double what you write. Domestic it’s $33,139,000. You write it’s 29.2. You missed about 30 million worth of gross in your article. Still not great, but a slightly different story.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.