I got to talk to Arnold Schwarzenegger this week, but just for a few minutes. We spoke about his new movie Aftermath, his career trajectory, his best one-liners, and the future of franchises like The Terminator and Conan the Barbarian. I didn’t ask him about The Expendables, because there just wasn’t enough time and, frankly, I’m not a huge fan of The Expendables series, which has never delivered on the promise of its amazing casts of ’80s and ’90s greats teaming up for action madness.

There’s also the little matter of Sylvester Stallone reportedly departing the series, and it’s hard to imagine any Expendables movie without him; he directed the first film and starred in the entire trilogy. Schwarzenegger apparently agrees, as he told Entertainment Weekly, “There is no Expendables without Sly. I would never do the movie without him.”

Schwarzenegger also offered some candid thoughts on the franchise as a whole:

You know, I think the first and second one were terrific. But, the third one, I thought my part was not written well. It was also not playing well in the movie, as far as I was concerned. Maybe other people believed differently. But I didn’t believe that I had any value in the movie. I love the franchise, by the way. I think it’s a spectacular franchise, The Expendables.

I’m not sure the first two were “terrific,” but the third was definitely the worst of the bunch. Really, none of them were all that great. (And can we just talk for a second about the fact that almost no one ever dies in a franchise called The Expendables? Do they not know what that word means?) Now Escape Plan, that was a franchise worth continuing.

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