Summary

• Despite being a box office flop, Expend4bles surprisingly earned the best Rotten Tomatoes audience score of all Expendables movies at 70%.
• Audiences and critics have very different preferences; viewers may enjoy Expend4bles' chaos while critics may focus on its faults like bad CGI.
• Expend4bles lacked the star power and nostalgia factor of its predecessors, leading to speculation about the future of the franchise.

Near the end of 2023, Sylvester Stallone reunited with other notable action stars to release the fourth movie in their long-running action franchise, Expend4bles, and though this film ended up being a major box office flop, there is one area in which the sequel ended up being better than the rest. In 2010, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and other iconic action stars came together to star in the very first Expendables movie. Since then, three more movies have been made, and despite the original's success, some of the consequent sequels have done much worse.

When the first Expendables movie came out in 2010, it was a relative hit, both among critics and at the box office. On a budget of $80 million, it earned $274 million, and furthermore, critics enjoyed the star-studded cast of action stars who all seemed to click perfectly in order to make a high-tension, explosive action movie. The Expendables 2 followed in its predecessor's footsteps, earning $315 million at the box office and earning praise for its over-the-top entertainment value. However, The Expendables 3 is where the franchise began to slow, and Expend4bles may have killed the franchise.

Expendables 4 Has The Highest Audience Score On Rotten Tomatoes

Expend4bles earned a 70% on RT

Despite the fact that Expend4bles earned a measly $50 million at the box office, it has the best Rotten Tomatoes audience score of all four Expendables movies. 2010's The Expendables earned a 64%, The Expendables 2 has a 67%, The Expendables 3 includes the worst score at 48%, while Expend4bles boasts a full 70%. This is a huge discrepancy considering how much the first two Expendables movies earned versus how little Expend4bles made. It may be possible that fewer people went to see Expend4bles, but those who did see it thought it was the best of the four.

Notably, these audience scores are vastly different from the critics' scores The Expendables franchise has earned on Rotten Tomatoes over the year. Expend4bles may have the best audience score with a 70%, but its critics' score is a spare 14%. Furthermore, 2010's The Expendables has a 42% critics' score, The Expendables 2 a 67%, and The Expendables 3 a 32%. Going by this logic, critics liked The Expendables 2 the best, and this movie was the highest-grossing of the four, whereas Expend4bles was the lowest-grossing, but the best rated by audiences.

Why Expendables 4's RT Audience Score Is So Much Better Than Its Critics Score

Audiences may like Expend4bles ridiculousness

It is strange to see Expend4bles with Rotten Tomatoes scores that are so wildly disparate. Expend4bles' 14% critics' score should not sit alongside a 70% audience score. This phenomenon is rare, but it is important to understand why it happens. One of the main reasons for Expend4bles unaligned Rotten Tomatoes scores is that audiences are watching the movie in a different way than critics.

While critics are searching for good and bad, audiences are simply looking to have a good time. A viewer may not be as affected by bad dialogue or plot holes if they are entertained.

Furthermore, audiences may actually enjoy the aspects of Expend4bles that critics hate. For example, audiences may have liked the chaotic violence and nonsensical dialogue of Expend4bles because it made the movie more fun, whereas critics are more concerned with whether the film made sense, and in those cases, it did not. Additionally, audiences may be more taken in by the cast than critics are. While critics are hyper aware of how each actor performs, that actor's mere presence may be enough to satisfy audience members. All in all, their different priorities could easily lead to vastly different Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Expendables 4's Audience Rotten Tomatoes Score Makes No Sense

Critics have good reasons to dislike Expend4bles

In reality, Expend4bles should not have the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of all The Expendables movies. It may be true that audiences and critics are looking for different things in a movie, however Expend4bles faults should have been big enough to affect regular viewers. One major example is Expedn4bles bad CGI. The movie used special effects that were blatantly bad and should have taken anyone out of the movie. Furthermore, the action and violence of Expend4bles was far less interesting than previous Expendables movies. Above all, Expedn4bles lost the big draw of the franchise: its cast.

There is no word about whether Expendables 5 is happening.

What made The Expendables franchise so unique was its reunion of huge action stars, and notably, Expend4bles lacked this major detail. Although there were certainly important stars in Expend4bles cast, they did not have the same credibility as those in past movies, and additionally, there were less of them. This meant that Expend4bles had less star power, less nostalgia factor, and therefore, was arguably worse than its predecessors. In this way, Expend4bles Rotten Tomatoes score makes no sense, and yet, it is what it is.