No Kids Showed Up To The First Two Expendables Movies

At Cannes, Sylvester Stallone declared that they wanted to reach a new audience with The Expendables 3.  “We want to reach as many people as possible […] I think we owe it to the next generation.”  The implication in those words, especially the word ‘owe’, is that some people are being denied the experience of watching these movies.  And since he is talking about the rating being PG-13, he’s talking about children.

Well let me tell you that they’re not being denied shit.

You see when kids want to see a movie, whether it’s R-Rated or not, one way or another, they’re going to get in.  I mentioned this last night in my review of 22 Jump Street, which was polluted with children, mostly very young girls giggling over Tatum.  There are several reasons for this.  The first is that quite often, the ticket sales desk simply lets anyone buy any ticket, including those bus loads of kids.  And even if they don’t the kids simply switch screening rooms.  Most cinemas have a lot of screens, with an employee on guard to check and rip tickets.  But because there are so many screens, he’ll usually stand further down the line.  There’s no point in paying ten people to guard the doors of ten screens.  All they care about is whether or not you’ve paid for something.

And that’s when the kids simply choose the movie they really want to see, when they pass the clerk and head to one of the showrooms.

Now onto my point.  When I viewed the first two movies multiple times, not once did I see any kids.  They simply didn’t give a shit.  It’s not that they were denied entry, it’s that they just chose to see something else.  Hell, the little bastards often show up to these ‘grown up movies’ with 40 minutes to go, after their own movie has ended.  Switching screens to get a free extra hour at the cinema.  But even for The Expendables 1 or 2, they were nowhere to be seen like that either.  They just went home.

In a sense it would be reasonable to want to change the rating if these movies were packed with kids who paid for a ticket to another movie, only to sneak in to see Stallone.  That would be a worry.  But that’s not happening and it isn’t happening because they couldn’t care less about Stallone.  They don’t even know who he is.  They for damned sure don’t know who Kelsey Grammer is.  I would understand it if they did hire someone like Channing Tatum, in an effort to draw in these crowds.  But they aren’t.  They’re hiring Kellen Lutz and Ronda Rousey.  Kids don’t care about those two either because they don’t know who they are.  And yet they put both Grammer and Rousey in the TV spot instead of Gibson and Snipes, whom the target audience would instantly been sold on.

The “logic” borders somewhere between deranged and laughable, that younger cast = younger audience, regardless of whether or not the younger cast is actually known.  Hey guys!  This one is 28!  Let’s cast him and watch the big bucks roll in!  The fuck outta here!  What they have actually done is alienated their own audience in a failed attempt to widen the net.

So this August, they’ll have expected a bigger catch – but they can expect the empty seats to be more freely available too, and no kids will fill them.