Warning: Major spoilers for The Expendables 4 below!

Summary

• Expendables 4 snubs Sylvester Stallone's character Barney Ross, implying he has few genuine friends and highlighting a lack of major cameos.
• Stallone's other franchises, like Rambo and Rocky, have also seen his famous characters retire or face ambiguous fates in recent years.
• The terrible reviews and disappointing box office performance of Expendables 4 suggest the series may have come to an end, despite Barney's fake death leaving room for a potential sequel.

Expendables 4 featured a major scene that feels like a big snub aimed at Sylvester Stallone's Barney Ross, which reverses a problem for one of his other franchises. In recent years, it appears Stallone has decided to lay his most famous characters to rest. With Rambo: Last Blood he left the titular soldier's fate on an ambiguous note after one last, bloody confrontation, while he's kept true to his word - so far - to retire Rocky Balboa following 2018's Creed 2. With Expendables 4, he appeared set to leave the action saga he created and hand the keys over to co-lead Jason Statham.

While this sparked fan theories that Stallone's Barney would die, this didn't prove to be the case. Instead, Barney fakes his death during the story to lure a terrorist out of hiding, though the sequel only reveals this ruse during The Expendables 4's ending. It's possible the franchise could continue, but the terrible reviews the fourth entry faced along its decidedly tepid box office suggest the series has just been expended. Barney may have lived to fight another day, but the sequel unintentionally revealed something very depressing about mercenary life.

Expendables 4's Barney Ross Funeral Made Major Characters Missing Even Weirder

Barney's "death" at the end of the first act naturally triggers a memorial scene among his team, who drink to his memory at their local bar. However, the mourners are confined to the current of Barney's team only, with no cameos from his supposed friends like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Trench, Wesley Snipes' Doc, Mickey Rourke's Tool and so forth. The brief of the series was to reunite as many action icons in one movie as possible, so the complete absence of any major cameos in this scene casts an even more depressing shadow around it.

The implication is either that they're all dead - which is unlikely in itself - or they couldn't be bothered to show up for their fallen comrade. Of course, the real-world reason is that scheduling even a couple of big-name cameos would have involved working out complicated scheduling and maybe even a big fee for what amounts to a brief appearance, which was probably more hassle than the studio was willing to deal with. Still, for a franchise built around gathering a large ensemble, the lack of mourners for Barney is fairly egregious.

Expendables 4 Has The Opposite Sylvester Stallone Problem Of Creed 3

Expendables 4 also reverses a problem that faced Creed III, following Stallone's exit as Rocky. During the latter sequel, Adonis' (Michael B. Jordan) mother Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) es away, and while a funeral scene is shown, Rocky isn't in attendance. Given how close Rocky was to Adonis and the Creed family, this made his absence all the more glaring. A Rocky cameo would have made sense during this scene, but the fact Stallone refused to make an appearance in the sequel ruled that out.

Expendables 4's big funeral flips that problem. In the story, it makes it appear Barney has few genuine friends, while only highlighting that the production wasn't interested in trying to secure even a couple of cameos. In retrospect this might have been for the best, considering Barney was faking his death. Still, it's a hard issue to completely overlook.