Guest Column: EX3 Bomb A Victory? Maybe Not

By: EightiesPower

In regards to the article “A Major Victory For R-Rated Action” written by The Night Rider I feel that sentiments expressed therein may be a bit overoptimistic and premature. To my mind the only thing the execs are likely to infer from this debacle is that a) piracy is the devil incarnate (nihil novi for Hollywood and its lobbyist MPAA stooges), and b) old action stars are no longer a selling point (a conclusion reinforced by the performances of all post Ex2 movies starring either Sly or Arnie). Point b) in particular may sway them towards not making movies featuring those guys altogether, which I can in no way see as a victory for this site. I guess Sly and Arnie still have Rambo 5 and Terminator: …ehm, Genisys (sorry, but writing this subtitle with a straight face is a feat that has so far eluded me) respectively, but it’s not just them who stand to lose on this. Can Snipes or Gibson’s struggles to revitalize their careers benefit in any way from being part of such a trainwreck (not referring to the movie’s opening here)? will Lundgren or Couture ever again find employment in the movie industry outside of DTV land of obscurity?

Right now, the landscape for traditional Hollywood action movies is back to looking seriously grim after the brief revival brought on by Rambo 4 and Ex1. Ex3, regardless of its concessions to the mainstream, no matter what the resident purists (among whom I’d like to count myself, to dispel any confusion)’ consensus on this matter may be, is still regarded as an example of a traditional action movie by the Tinseltown bean counters and its failure is unlikely to impel them to bankroll more R-rated counterparts, instead of abandoning the subgenre completely. Particularly seeing as the leading more or less pure-breed action franchise right now is Taken, which as we all now, sticks to PG-13 in the US theaters.

PG-13-ization of movies in general is often a symptom of the filmmakers’ attempts to “modernize” a franchise. My suspicion here is that the execs will simply think the reason Ex3 failed was that it was not modernized enough, or that its premise just could not be made modern enough to begin with, which, together with the gimmick of casting all the old-school tough guys getting, well, old, made this franchise unsustainable in the long run and thus – expendable (finally making good on their titles’ promise, if not quite in the way most of us would expect).

I’m sorry to say that the time spent on observing the movie industry caused me to infer that among the hacks running the show the most pervasive “reasoning” is to follow the leader, try and (often feebly) imitate whatever gives the biggest returns at any given moment. It is exact that mentality which seemed to have caused the downfall of an adult action flick back in the early 2000’s, seeing as up till the very end big budget + R rating was in no way a recipe for disaster. However, since those movies could not keep pace with CGI-laden feature-length toy commercials, they ended up getting dropped rather unceremoniously.

Many of us, for understandable reasons, cling to a belief that the studios learn from past mistakes, as The Night Rider’s write up amply shows. I ask you to consider the facts, though. Did Robocop 3’s failure prevent the studio from making the reboot PG-13 again? Hell, did even their previous botched attempt to remake a Verhoeven classic into a slick and sanitized product prevent Sony from making the exact same mistake less than 2 years later? I fear we’re about to see lots of such mistakes made still and many of our beloved franchises will have to suffer due to execs’ tunnel vision.