A couple of weeks ago we heard from Randy Couture that he expected filming to commence on The Expendables 3 later in the year, despite the fact that the second installment in the star-studded action series doesn’t arrive in cinemas until August. Well, if that proves to be the case, we could be seeing another former big-name action star lining up alongside Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren and company as several sites are reporting that Stallone has made an offer to rescue Steven Seagal from direct-to-video-land with a role in the third movie.
The report originally emerged from Joblo’s Arrow in the Head, who found a quote from Seagal stating that “He [Sylvester Stallone] plans to do another one and I have already been made an offer. We’ll see…” The quote came from an interview over at Excessif.com, which took place at the back end of 2011; if true, and Stallone has been developing The Expendables 3 since last year, then it certainly makes it a little more believable cameras could start rolling on the film by Couture’s predicted fall start-date.
Making his film debut in 1988 with Above the Law (a.k.a. Nico), Steven Seagal enjoyed some early success with the likes of Hard to Kill, Out for Justice, Under Siege and Executive Decision, but his box-office star began to lose its shine with the poorly received Under Siege 2: Dark Territory and ‘environmentally friendly’ flops On Deadly Ground and Fire Down Below. After a brief direct-to-video spell, Seagal returned to cinemas with the 2001 hit Exit Wounds, but further theatrical failures soon consigned him to the bottom shelf as Seagal went on to produce and star in a host of low-budget DTV efforts with titles that typically adopted a variation on ‘Out for [Insert]’ or ‘[Insert] a Kill‘ [so far, he’s yet to get round to Out for a Buck, but we suspect it’s been the working title on quite a few]. Nevertheless, Seagal has remained a cult favourite – with recent roles including a big-screen return in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, along with the undercover cop show True Justice – so I’m sure there’ll be plenty of fans excited by his potential addition to The Expendables roster.
Before we get to a third movie however, there’s also the small matter of The Expendables 2, which is set to arrive on August 17th and sees the aforementioned Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, Norris, Lundgren and Couture joined by Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Liam Hemsworth, Charisma Carpenter, Nan Yu and Scott Adkins, while Jean-Claude Van Damme also joins the cast as the appropriately-named bad guy, Jean Vilain.
