JOHN NOLTE: Weekend Box Office Crashes to 2023 Low.

The weekend box office grossed just $48.9 million this weekend. That’s the total box office. That’s all the movies in every theater in North America. That means only around 6.2 million North Americans bothered to go to the movies this weekend.

So what was the problem?

Well, who asked for a fourth chapter of the Expendables? Hey, I love Stallone, Statham, and Lundgren, but the third chapter, which came out all the way back in 2014, bombed. Truth be told, I enjoyed the original franchise more and more as it went along. The third chapter was my favorite. Still, I was not clamoring for part four. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever watch part four. The lack of stars in part four doesn’t help. Expend4bles feels like those Dirty Dozen TV sequels that came out in the eighties. They’d bring back one or two of the original movie’s aging stars — Ernest Borgnine or Telly Savalas — and replace the rest with TV actors.

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Hollywood is the only industry with an entire media ecosystem protecting it from any talk about its overall product quality.

Well, outside of NBCABCPBSCBSCNN and their coverage of the Democratic Party in DC.