It will be interesting to see how this weekend shapes up. Three high profile movies are opening against each other, each playing to a different niche. Moms and daughters everywhere will bond with Julia Roberts in “Eat, Pray, Love”; geeks will get their fill with Edgar Wright’s “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” and guys young and old will be flocking to see shit blow up real good in Sylvester Stallone’s “The Expendables.” While the latter film is apparently tracking well, this writer is awaiting the inevitable ‘Scott Pilgrim’/’Eat Pray Love’-ticket-sales-were-inflated-because-of-teens-buying-tickets-to-sneak-into-“The Expendables” arguments that will flare up when the film doesn’t quite perform as expected over the weekend.
Anyway, writer/director Sylvester Stallone will be watching those numbers carefully and if they land where he wants them to, he already has a sequel idea in mind. He tells the LA Times, “If this does perform, I think it will open a little more liquidity in funding the sequel. I have an idea ready to go. People think doing a sequel is easy, but it’s not because you need the element of surprise. I’m going to try to do something that’s quite radical.” We hope by “radical” he means constructing a followup that actually has a plot with a semblance of coherence. But the film will have to go a long way to get financiers for a sequel; the budget of the film was about $80 million not counting P&A and with an R-rating, it will need to go a long way to break even.
But while Stallone has made his way back into the mainstream eye thanks for revisiting past glories, there is still his long gestating dream project, “Poe” that is, yes indeed, a biopic about the famed poet. Robert Downey Jr. was attached to the project back when no one in Hollywood would return his calls, and while his schedule is packed for the foreseeable future, as recently as last year he expressed interest in doing the film. While movement on the project seems to have stalled, Stallone is adamant that RDJ is the right guy for the job and if he can’t do it, someone “special” is required for the part telling MTV, “It has be like Downey, I designed it for Downey. Perhaps I could re-work the script. [Maybe] Johnny Depp. It needs a very special actor like that.”
But Stallone has no illusions about the box office prospects of a biopic about an old-timey writer and poet saying, “No matter what I do it’s going to bomb, totally. Totally! When you’ve been talking about something for 30 years, it’s impossible [to live up to those expectations].” Maybe he could find a way to get Jet Li in there?
“The Expendables” opens this Friday, and while we didn’t particularly care for it, we can promise stuff does get exploded.