Ghost Franchise: Hollywood’s Gender-Swapped 'Expendables' Is Already Dead On Arrival

The latest all-female franchise revision from woke Hollywood sounds awful

Ghostbusters 2016 was an all-female flop that lost $70 million for Sony Pictures

Lionsgate says they will be making an all-female version of The Expendables. The proposed title, Expendabelles, is a terrific dad joke. The positives end there. Yet another gender-swapped ‘boy brand’ is being set up for failure on the wrongheaded assumption that women will turn out to see it in droves.

“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”, Heidi Jo Markel tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Perhaps Markel lives in a different universe than I do. On the planet Earth in the universe where I live, there exists zero global appetite for female-driven action franchises because men are the primary audience for action films.

The women who see action films go with the men in their lives. They do not seek out such content on their own.

If anything, the feminized ‘boy brand’ performs even worse than original action content with women in the lead. In a recent example, Daisy Ridley’s 2025 action thriller Cleaner, a Die Hard clone, was a huge box office disaster, grossing only about $1.3 million worldwide against a $25 million budget. Producers bet low and still lost.

“This is a world audiences know, but we’re introducing them to it in a way they’ve never seen before”, Glenn Gainor tells THR. Gainor is a co-founder of Hollywood Ventures Group (HVG) and a former Amazon Prime executive.

While Gainor was not responsible for Rings of Power shredding the literary legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien with a female lead, the cool reception from its intended audience is yet another example of where this is most likely going. Actress Morfydd Clark plays Galadriel as a relentlessly unlikeable person, contributing to a collapse in viewership.

Expendabelles has been stuck in development hell since 2014. Jeffrey Greenstein of Millennium, which is attached to the project, says the biggest problem was “trying to find a way to justify why we’d have a woman team.”

Indeed, the action genre is a man’s world, while the suspension of disbelief becomes impossible whenever women are portrayed as the physical equals of men.

The reason Atomic Blonde worked in 2017, when the all-female Ghostbusters had flopped the year before, is that actress Charlize Theron was never put into an unrealistic combat scene against men.

Instead of trying to make her seem their physical equal, the fight direction showed her winning through guile and gunshots, taking harder blows than she could give back and staying out of grappling range.

For Expendabelles, the biggest problem will be finding enough women who are equal to the male stars of the franchise.

Against Jason Staham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wesley Snipes, and Antonio Banderas, we could line up Gina Carano, and… well, that’s about it. I doubt there are enough actresses of her physical caliber to carry the project.

To make matters worse, Expendabelles is meant to be an origin story for the franchise. Set “during the height of Y2K-era tension and geopolitical uncertainty”, the proposed plot falls into the gap between Cold War nostalgia and the War on Terror, leveraging a crisis that fizzled.

Half the action movie audience is men under 35, and hardly anyone that age will even remember the most disappointing doomsday of modern times. I lived through it all, and yet the plot description sounds boring.

Knowing nothing else about this movie, I would not go see it in a theater. For that matter, I would certainly not invest in any action-thriller project that gets announced at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cannes is synonymous with the elite-driven ‘Hollyweird’ cinema that has alienated audiences in the last decade. Expendabelles sounds like exactly the sort of DEI-infused film that wins Oscars while losing money, anymore. If I was a Hollywood investor, and knew nothing else about the proposed film, I would not invest in it.

Time will tell whether the project even happens. Many films get announced and never come together. If it does, the chances of success seem very slim. There is no demand from the masses for an all-female Expendables. No one asked anyone to ‘reimagine’ the franchise.

Instead, this sounds like the kind of movie that Hollywood wants to impress upon us, whether we like it or not, for our own good. And we are so, so tired of those. For all of these reasons, I suspect this franchise revision will ultimately never happen. The announcement will be a phantom that vanishes.