Scott Adkins, the star of popular martial arts movies like Undispited 3 and Ninja will headline John Hyams Universal Soldier 4. The film reunites Adkins with Jean-Claude Van Damme, whom he co-stars with in the upcoming the Weapon movie. Michael Jai White, previously announced as being in the film, is reportedly not onboard. Andrei Arlovski, who co-starred in Universal Soldier : Regeneration, is back for this latest one. While Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren are reprising their iconic Universal Soldier roles, their roles are little more than cameos this time, according to the aforementioned site.
First Universal Soldier was made in 1992 by Roland Emmerich and collected $102,000,000 worldwide with a budget of $23,000,000. 7 years later in 1999 producers released Universal Soldier: The Return which is collected only $33,007,861 with a budget of $19,000,000. And only in 2009 we enjoyed the third part of this series called Universal Soldier: Regeneration, which with a budget of $14,000,000 collected only $845,197.
Why producers jump on this train again? There is no more ideas how to use van Damme’s popularity today? Jean looks good in drama movies like JCVD or in his lates tv show Behind Closed Doors, so go with it. Dolph Lundgren is not the same tough guy, looks a really tired, so maybe give the way to new action stars? Scott Adkins is definetely good choice and I hope in 5th part he will get a lead role, but the main question: “Do we need more Universal Soldiers?”
But there is a good point, van Damme agreed to play with new martial artists without afraid of good perfomance from their side, like he did before together with Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren, getting rid of talented actors in upcoming movies. So I hope one day some producer or old-school actor will unite martial artists for some interesting project like The Expendables…
Meanwhile, Vin Diesel is still interested in XXX : The Return of Xander Cage and by all indications, the project is still a go. Nobody stays dead in moviedom. Director of Fast Five Justin Lin have got an idea for Terminator 5, Schwarzenegger agreed to do the film and Lin was given the go-ahead to start shopping the project around.
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