Eclectic Pictures and Hollywood Ventures Group unveiled Expendabelles at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, setting up a female-driven expansion of the Expendables franchise with Lionsgate support. The project is being developed as an origin story set in the late 1990s, during the height of Y2K-era tension and geopolitical uncertainty.
The new film is not a direct remake of the action series that began in 2010 with Sylvester Stallone and a cast that included Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Terry Crews and Mickey Rourke. The first movie grossed north of $100 million, and the franchise has since grown to four films, later adding names such as Bruce Willis, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, Glen Powell, Antonio Banderas and Victor Ortiz.
The team says Expendabelles has been in the works for more than a decade, after an earlier version was set up in 2014 at Millennium Films with Robert Luketic attached to direct. That version would have centered on female operatives posing as call girls to rescue a nuclear scientist being held hostage. Millennium’s Jeffrey Greenstein said one of the hurdles was “trying to find a way to justify why we’d have a woman team.”
This time, the filmmakers are taking a different route. The project is being framed as an origin story rather than a direct redo of the earlier concept, and Eclectic Pictures and HVG said they are now in the packaging phase and actively assembling creative talent for the spin-off. The push comes after Lionsgate acquired the rights to the Expendables franchise late last year, giving the new project a clear path forward.
Expendabelles will be produced by Eclectic’s Heidi Jo Markel and HVG co-founder Glenn Gainor. The executive producer team includes Sandy Climan, Joe Smith, Nelly Kim, Julie Kroll, Stephen R. Foreht and John Yarincik. Markel said the group was thrilled to bring the project to life with Hollywood Ventures Group and to reimagine the property on a much larger cinematic scale.
For the franchise, the move is both familiar and new: familiar because it returns to a brand built around Stallone’s original success, and new because it tries to give the series a different starting point and a different center of gravity. Whether that approach lands will depend on the talent the companies are still assembling, but the project has moved past the stage where an all-female Expendables was only an idea on a slate.
