‘Expendables 4’ Aiming For $15M-$17M Opening Stateside – Box Office Preview
20.09.2023 - 19:27
/ deadline.com
On another sleepy autumn weekend at the box office when actors can’t promote their movies due to the strikes, Millennium Media and Lionsgate are rolling out the latest in their long-in-the-tooth Sylvester Stallone-Jason Statham franchise, Expendables 4, to a weekend take between $15 million-$17 million.
That range is right around where 2014’s Expendables 3 opened –$15.8M– and not far from where Stallone’s last Rambo film resided pre-pandemic, 2019’s Rambo: Last Blood, which bowed to $18.8M. Expendables 3 ended its stateside run at $39.3M while Rambo: Last Blood finaled at $44.8M.
Guys over 25 are the grab with the fourth movie about over-the-hill action heroes booked in 3,400 theaters. The R-rated movie is also playing at 700 PLF screens including XD, RPX, Dolby and D BOX. Previews start at 6 p.m. Thursday.
Similar to other Lionsgate pics with Millennium, the former is handling North America and UK. Again, all these meat-and-potatoes guy action films are built to profit despite the fact that we might see blasé box office numbers. Lionsgate only spends so much on P&A to ensure there’s a pop in the home window; if that wasn’t the case, it wouldn’t be making these movies. Read, we haven’t seen a sequel to the Gerard Butler $140M-budgeted bomb Gods of Egypt, which made $31M domestic and $150.6M worldwide.
Expendables 4 has a reported $100M production cost and the big play for Millennium is global, with the third movie grossing $214.6M, the second movie in 2012 earning $314.9M, and the original 2010 feature making $171.4M. Expendables 4 opened to $11M in China this past weekend; the territory is a robust one for the franchise, with the third pic amassing close to $73M alone there (unadjusted for foreign currency swings,