For me there were two reasons that a Universal Soldier III film would be exciting, one was Jean-Claude Van Damme and the other Dolph Lundgren, oh yes budget and script were important too, but those two actors were key for me.

News has come in today that wrecks the idea of a third Universal Soldier for me and makes me think it's going to be a pretty poor film.

Okay, to be fair it wasn't going to be ground breaking, but Universal Soldier was a lot of fun and the idea of bringing back the two leads, like so many other eighties stars are being brought back, for another Universal Soldier outing would have been superb fun.

However that doesn't look like it's going to happen, even though the latest news is that Jean-Claude Van Damme has signed up for the film already.

The news comes from MTV, and here's why I'm not so interested any more. One is the amount of time that Jean-Claude Van Damme is in the film:

"I'm just going to do 10 days."

The other is Dolph Lundgren, and this is what Van Damme had to say about his ex co-star:

"I told them, guys bring in Dolph! They said there's no more value [to cast him]. I said, 'it will have value with me!"

Well the studio have missed the point. Where's the value? The box office return of seeing the action fans return to this great fun partnership. That for me is a disaster, and bringing Van Damme in for a mere ten days shoot is pretty poor too, it sounds like he's going to be pulled into the film just enough to get the old fans excited to pay their tickets, only to find out he just keeps popping up and making the connection to the first film. Poor choice.

Van Damme also reveals that Peter Hyams, the director of Timecop, is going to be on board as the director of photography, and that he was the only person out of all the industry execs who made money out of the Van Damme action ride that visited him during his rehab.

This is a real shame, I was all excited for a third film and really began to get excited about a possible team up with the two stars, and while Van Damme reveals that the third film will have something to do with the past, that ten day shoot and lack of Dolph Lundgren reveals to me that it is just something, not everything.

Terrible news, Universal Soldier III is a fraction of the film I was hoping for, and it's not even started filming yet.