Meh. IMO, the main (and quite modest) charm of the
Expendables series, especially the first movie, is that it acknowledges how scuzzy and borderline definitionally villainous mercenary combat work is. The Expendables aren't good people; at best, they're not quite as bad as the baddies they fight, but one gets the sense that they're all one bad day and one tempting paycheck away from fighting
for those baddies.
Personally, I just don't see that dynamic working with female characters. I don't think it's a coincidence that action movies' most popular fighting female characters - Ripley, Sarah Connor, Leia, Neytiri, horror movie Final Girls in general, etc. - tend not to be career warriors by choice. They're fighters because they're either directly targeted by the villains (Sarah Connor), trapped in a life-or-death situation (Ripley), or their whole communities are in imminent danger of extermination (Leia, Neytiri). I guess Wonder Woman is a bit of a special case in that she's arguably destined by parentage and fate to be a warrior, but once her origin story movie was told, her second big-screen live-action story didn't garner much interest. Attempts to kick off female spy/assassin franchises tend not to do too well, and I don't recall anyone raving about the mercenary character Scarlett Johansson played in the last
Jurassic World movie (quick, tell me her name without a web search, if you can!). Or, to put it bluntly: the longer female characters are willing and eager to be professional combatants when not immediately necessary, the less audiences seem to be enthused about them.
Of course, I could always be wrong, and such a movie could be a bit hit. We'll see.
