10 Movie Franchises That Destroyed Themselves With ONE Decision

While the first two Expendables films were hardly great works of cinema, they at least delivered the basic goods that audiences craved: cartoonishly brutal, R-rated action led by a cast of revered action stars.

The Expendables 3 inexplicably saw Sylvester Stallone attempting to make the series more appealing to younger audiences, and so had the movie shot for a PG-13 rating.

Unsurprisingly, this left many fans deeply disappointed, that the hardcore violence of the first two films was replaced with mostly bloodless, impact-free death.

This wasn't what fans signed up for when the series started, and so to the shock of few, it was by far the lowest-grossing film of the trilogy.

Stallone initially blamed the under-performance on a leaked copy of the film landing online before release, but it was painfully clear that old-school action fans had little interest in a cynically sanitised threequel.

And so, six years later a fourth film still hasn't materialised, even as Stallone continually insists that it's in development.

With Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in particular swiftly approaching their mid-70s, just how believable is it that The Expendables 4 will ever come to pass?