{"id":16390,"date":"2014-07-25T16:54:01","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T23:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allouttabubblegum.com\/?p=16390"},"modified":"2025-10-06T04:36:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T10:36:34","slug":"expendables-and-pg-13-dancing-with-inevitability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/expendables-and-pg-13-dancing-with-inevitability\/","title":{"rendered":"Expendables and PG-13: Dancing With Inevitability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"My<\/a><\/p>\n

Look at that banner image.\u00a0 Would you just look at it?\u00a0 Damn.\u00a0 These movies are going to have to seriously start culling some of the cast or their just going to be a series of walk-on cameos with a soundtrack of gunshots, explosions, and stock punching and kicking sounds.\u00a0 But examining that picture, one gets the feeling of something akin to seeing an attendance photo from a family reunion.\u00a0 Everyone’s having a blast.\u00a0 Then you look at Stallone, in the center of it all.\u00a0 He’s having a smoke.\u00a0 This isn’t just some good time for him, it’s a victory lap.<\/p>\n

And why not?\u00a0 A quick glance at the box office receipts shows the following:<\/p>\n

The Expendables:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 $274,470,394<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Expendables 2:\u00a0 \u00a0$305,428,192<\/strong><\/p>\n

From a numbers trajectory, it would seem the next movie is on track for somewhere approaching $350,000,000<\/strong>.\u00a0 That ain’t chump change for an adult-oriented American Action movie series.\u00a0 Not in the comic book movie era.\u00a0 Not in the Marvel Era.\u00a0 But murmurs of a PG-13 rating are (once again<\/a>) abound, with Sly even admitting to it (again?<\/a>) and fans are up in arms.\u00a0 Now, I am speaking here as a film lover and as a fan of both of the previous Expendables<\/strong> films.\u00a0 These are deeply flawed movies, but I still love them.\u00a0 They have questionable plots, terrible dialog, poor effects, and direction that seems to teeter-totter between lazy and acceptable.\u00a0 In other words, they’re sort of like the Action movies of the 80s that inspired them.\u00a0 But would a PG-13 rating really wreck that?<\/p>\n

\"Don't<\/a><\/p>\n

Look, I was going to write about how much Action movies have meant to me.\u00a0 How much the rating, in fact, doesn’t really matter.\u00a0 How much much, if they could just focus on stunts, brilliant fight scenes, good humor and bold direction, they could still have a winner.\u00a0 Sure, Action movies are violent.\u00a0 That’s never been in doubt.\u00a0 But the level of violence doesn’t have to be excessive to be great.\u00a0 We’ll always have our violent movies from the past and our violent movies of the now.\u00a0 If Sylvester Stallone, Avi Lerner, and whoever else is in charge over at Nu Image and Millennium Films think that a PG-13 Expendables<\/strong> is the way to go out, I was going to say let them.\u00a0 If you want blood and gore in your Action movies, we have The Raid<\/strong> films, the Universal Soldier<\/strong> movies made by John Hyams, and many others to go to.\u00a0 But it doesn’t matter, what i was going to say.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, a “dvd-quality” copy of The Expendables 3<\/strong> was leaked onto the internet.\u00a0 Any money the studios thought they were going to make by toning down the film will almost certainly be lost by the mostly younger generation of media pirates.\u00a0 This is a lose-lose situation for them.\u00a0 The older generation, who helped sweep these movies into blockbuster territory, were likely going to pass on a kid-friendly version of this franchise, but can now find the movie for free.\u00a0 It’s funny, in a way.\u00a0 At Cannes, Stallone spoke of making the movie accessible for the younger audience, saying “I think we owe it to the next generation.” I wonder, after all these members of the “next generation” pirate the ever-loving shit out of The Expendables 3<\/strong>, if Sly will still feel he owes it to them.\u00a0 I’d like to think Sly and the rest just wanted to start up some new blood for the current generation, who sadly seem to lack a quantity of Action stars where older generations had plenty.\u00a0 Sure, they’ve got Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Vin Diesel (if you think he counts), and Gina Carano (if she keeps making movies).\u00a0 But are they Chuck Norris, Van Damme, Stallone, or Schwarzenegger?\u00a0 Maybe they will be.\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I hope so.<\/p>\n

The Expendables<\/strong> was supposed to be counter-programming to today’s version of an Action film.\u00a0 I find it ironic that it finally became one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Look at that banner image.\u00a0 Would you just look at it?\u00a0 Damn.\u00a0 These movies are going to have to seriously start culling some of the cast or their just going to be a series of walk-on cameos with a soundtrack of gunshots, explosions, and stock punching and kicking sounds.\u00a0 But examining that picture, one gets … Read moreExpendables and PG-13: Dancing With Inevitability<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[369,523,554,856,939,1171,1178,1601,1846,2038],"class_list":["post-16390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-copy","tag-dvd-quality","tag-expendables-3","tag-kain424","tag-leaked","tag-pg-13","tag-piracy","tag-sylvester-stallone","tag-the-raid","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40018,"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16390\/revisions\/40018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allouttabubblegum.com\/new-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}