After a few weeks of self-tweeted set photos, an official look at The Expendables 2 has finally arrived online in the form of the first poster. If you look at it from a certain angle, it's a Christmas Tree of badassery, with Sylvester Stallone as the trunk on the bottom and Jean-Claude Van Damme as the angel on the top. Or, OK, it's just a highly photoshopped poster. Whichever works for you. Check out the poster below, or click on it for the larger version at JoBlo, where it premiered.
Statements from Millennium's legal counsel explaining why they've required us to remove the poster:
To my knowledge, this poster was not made by anyone at Millennium and/or Lionsgate. It is a forgery.
We are requesting that the material be removed because we feel the it will harm our product and as such it is actionable.
Everyone in the poster seems to have been Photoshop-buffed to a high sheen, including Jason Statham and Terry Crews, who are really pretty young compared to the rest of the crowd. There's also a strange switcheroo between the credits at the top, which list the absent Liam Hemsworth, Jet Li and Randy Couture, and then the poster, which features a woman in the lineup I don't recognize at all. The movie's IMDB page lists Nan Yu and Amanda Ooms as the only women in the cast, and your guess is as good as mine as to which one she could be.
While this poster lacks the bombastic grace of the original Expendables poster, this one serves its purpose, which is basically to tell you once again that there are a bunch of badass stars in this movie and you will pay to watch them shoot guns. The Expendables 2 comes to theaters August 17 next year, so you have a while to figure out who exactly is the most Photoshopped in this poster. I vote for Schwarzenegger.
