Mickey Rourke is out of Expendables 2

Mickey Rourke may have cut his usual fee for The Expendables as a favour to his old pal Sylvester Stallone, but it seems his goodwill isn’t going to extend to the sequel.

Rourke has left the project because he wasn’t offered enough money to make it. We're officially crushed.

It’s a MASSIVE shame, Rourke was by far the best thing in Expendables - his speech about his time in Bosnia involved such great acting it felt weirdly out of place.

Sure, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and possibly Nicolas Cage and John Travolta will be joining the rest of the Expendables crew for the follow-up, but it’s simply not going to be the same without Mickey.

Rourke is going to make something called Seven Psychopaths instead. It's about a screenwriter who kidnaps a gangster’s dog.

Oh, Mickey, what a pity.

Sam Ashurst is a London-based film maker, journalist, and podcast host. He's the director of Frankenstein's Creature, A Little More Flesh + A Little More Flesh 2, and co-hosts the Arrow Podcast. His words have appeared on HuffPost, MSN, The Independent, Yahoo, Cosmopolitan, and many more, as well as of course for us here at 12DOVE.