The Grey producer Adi Shankar has already lined up the first woman for his female take on The Expendables, and somewhat unsurprisingly it's Gina Carano.

The former mixed martial artist has made quite a name for herself in Hollywood over the past year. Steven Soderbergh took her under his wing in 2009 for the thriller Haywire, and that role gave her a chance to show off her impressive skills as an action heroine when it finally came out last year. Carano went on to land roles in In the Blood and Fast & Furious 6 before getting this big part.

Variety broke the news about Carano's casting, and we're sure she'll just be one of many actresses who join the project. Dutch Southern is writing the as-yet-untitled movie, and Shankar said he never planned to make the movie without Carano.

"I don’t know how I’m supposed to make a movie that is supposed to be the female version of The Expendables without Gina Carano in it," he told Variety. "It would be like making Twix without caramel or Jamba Juice without jamba."

Meanwhile, The Expendables 2 director Simon West is also on board with a female version of The Expendables, and has said has plenty of ideas if his bosses at Lionsgate ever approached him about it.

"I like the idea of the Expenda-Belles where it's seven or eight women mercenaries. It would be Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, Milla Jovovich, the list goes on. Helen Mirren, Jamie Lee Curtis would be great," he told E! Online last month. "It would be running parallel [to The Expendables]. They would meet up and then they would fight and they would join up and save each other."