For Sylvester Stallone, the question of what goes into a female-biased instalment in his Expendables franchise is a tough one.

“With The Expendabelles, we’re in uncharted waters,” he said during a roundtable interview with the press while promoting The Expendables 3. “To put all women together, will that really work? Do you have to put in some women that are actually really known to be tough – other MMA fighters [like Ronda Rousey who appears in The Expendables 3]? Or are the Expendabelles really part of a divorce, with Sigourney Weaver as my wife and she’s inherited half of the Expendables?”

Stallone laughed, “It’s like, I’ve got to deal with that too, I lost the house and my mercenaries.”

The Expendabelles will start shooting in early 2015 and is slated for release later next year but, according to Stallone, there’s no danger of it just being sold on a neat idea and a catchy name – the story actually matters.

“There are all these things we’re trying concoct so that when we do it, it doesn’t just languish there… it’s not just a use of the name but actually something that would hold its own.”

Sylvester Stallone has been in London this week, promoting the latest in his ongoing Expendables franchise. The third in the series tones down the violence of the first and second films in a move towards reaching a wider audience – but that doesn’t mean the stunts are any less spectacular in the film series that continues to resurrect the careers of ageing action heroes.

With talk surrounding further instalments rife (on top of the female-focussed Expendabelles movie) and the introduction of kick-ass MMA fighter Ronda Rousey into the cast as well as a new batch of  young action stars, Stallone shed some light on the direction he’d like the franchise to take.

“We’d like to just continue,” he says. “It’s an ongoing experiment. You have a great franchise in the Avengers where you can branch off and do other things. Ideally, I would love to see some of these characters, like Antonio Banderas’s Galgo or the young Expendables, go off and do their own movies. I know that’s maybe a pipe dream, but then you come together for the big festival of violence or the great challenge of whoever the villain is [in the main film series].

“I could definitely see one and a half, at least, maybe two more. You never know. But [with] the third one… I’ve always found that when I started doing films that were a franchise I was ridiculed for it – we all were. But I was always intrigued by television – how can they do ten years of the same character in the same location? And yet you watch it. But you do one film and you go, ‘Oh that’s the end’. Some films are designed like that but other films, you have characters that continue to grow and manifest different personality changes.”

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/08/sylvester-stallone-talks-plot-details-for-female-focussed-expendabelles?watch