Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham are reteaming for another action movie based on a novel, but can they correct a key mistake they made last time? Stallone and Statham are pals in real life and have collaborated many times over the years. They’ve co-starred in all The Expendables movies together, and despite featuring a sprawling ensemble, Stallone’s Barney and Statham’s Christmas are the undisputed main characters. Statham is making the kind of old-fashioned action movies that used to be Sly’s bread and butter, so it’s little wonder the latter has tried to build franchises around his successor.

The Expendables films are essentially a double act between the two, and while Expendables 4 tried to make Statham the official main character, the weak response to that entry has seemingly killed the franchise. In 2013, Stallone wrote and co-produced Homefront with Statham in the lead, where he plays a retired DEA agent named Phil Broker. The story involves Broker and his daughter moving to a small town in Louisiana, but despite his wish for a quiet life, he soon makes enemies with the local meth dealers and is forced to take them down.

Stallone & Statham’s Levon’s Trade Avoids Their Fatal Homefront Adaptation Error

Homefront was the wrong book to launch a Phil Broker franchise

Homefront was somewhat typical of the action movies Jason Statham was fronting during this era, like Safe. Homefront grossed over $50 million worldwide and received respectable reviews, but was far from the franchise launcher producers wanted. Homefront is part of the Phil Broker novels from author Chuck Logan, so there was plenty of material for sequels. Over a decade on, Stallone and Statham are reteaming for the action thriller Levon’s Trade, which is based on another novel about a retired badass, this time from author Chuck Dixon.

Levon’s Trade corrects a big Homefront mistake since it adapts the first novel in the series, not the last, as Stallone did with Homefront. Logan’s Phil Broker series began with 1997’s The Price of Blood, with Homefront being the last story in the timeline; Dixon later penned a prequel (fittingly titled Broker) in 2017. Adapting the final story first was a conceptual flaw while trying to launch a Broker movie franchise, since it felt like the third and final entry in a series, not the beginning.

In the event the film had been a huge success, producers would have then had to retrofit the previous novels around Broker’s retirement too. By the time Homefront wraps up, it feels like Broker’s story has already come to an end and there’s little reason to revisit the character. That might explain why there was little excitement about a potential franchise shortly after the film’s release.

Stallone Wanted To Turn Homefront Into A Rambo Sequel

The Homefront movie adaptation had a strange development cycle

2008’s Rambo brought Stallone’s titular character back to the big screen 20 years after his previous adventure. The film was hyperviolent and uncompromising, but before penning this version, Stallone went through a few unused concepts. One rejected idea was to adapt Homefront with Rambo in the lead, replacing Broker. The story would have played out much the same – which is partly why it didn’t work.

Stallone liked the story but felt it was a big leap for Rambo to have returned to America, become a DEA agent and had a daughter in the years following Rambo 3. He also thought Rambo should deal with the titular soldier returning home, so the idea was scrapped. This explains why Stallone adapted Homefront first since he had already put a lot of work into his draft and didn’t want to scrap it. All he had to do was remove any references to Rambo, and it functioned perfectly fine as a Homefront adaptation.

Levon’s Trade Can Become The Series Homefront Failed To Launch

Levon Cade can be the R-rated series Statham has been searching for

Levon’s Trade will reunite Statham with David Ayer, who directed his most recent hit The Beekeeper, another R-rated thriller about an elite killer coming out of retirement. Adapting the first Levon Cade book is the most logical place to start, and if the film works, there are over ten more stories to adapt. Statham has had hits with PG-13 fare like The Meg or Fast & Furious, but a solo R-rated series has eluded him in the last decade. In Levon Cade, he has a character that suits his talents perfectly.

In hindsight, Homefront was a bad choice to build a Broker series around. Maybe the only issue with Levon’s Trade is how much it sounds like The Beekeeper on paper, but Cade is a more fleshed-out figure in Dixon’s books and has a teenage daughter to care for. If nothing else, it holds the potential to be a fun action flick, but if it clicks with audiences, Levon’s Trade could be the Statham action franchise Homefront failed to be.