All-Female ‘Expendables’ Spinoff Gets Cute Title: ‘The Expendabelles’

Eclectic Pictures and Hollywood Ventures Group are teaming on a “female-driven expansion” of The Expendables franchise, tentatively titled The Expendabelles, reports THR.

Per the news, Expendabelles will serve as an origin story set in the late 1990s during the height of Y2K-era tension and geopolitical uncertainty.

The newly reimagined project — originally conceived more than a decade ago alongside Millennium by Heidi Jo Markel, Patrick Muldoon and Julie Kroll — plans to introduce a new generation of elite female operatives in “a stylized, action-driven cinematic event designed to expand the mythology of the franchise while standing firmly on its own,” the filmmakers told THR, adding that it is moving forward “with the support of Lionsgate.”

The site says that, ever since the first Expendables hit theaters in 2010 and went on to gross north of $100 million — effectively launching a Sylvester Stallone-led franchise that has now produced a total of four movies — a handful of filmmakers have tried to crack a version starring women in the lead roles.

Back in 2014, Legally Blonde helmer Robert Luketic was set to direct a version penned by that film’s scribes, Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah, for Millennium Films that was to center on female operatives who had to pose as call girls to rescue a nuclear scientist being held hostage, a plot that surely would be eviscerated online today.

That version never came to fruition, and nearly a decade later, Millennium’s Jeffrey Greenstein told The Hollywood Reporter that one of the challenges with getting that project off the ground was “trying to find a way to justify why we’d have a woman team.”

The first Expendables starred Stallone alongside the likes of , , , , , , and more.