23 Years Ago Today, Robert Rodriguez Completed His Most Important Franchise

It has been 23 years since Robert Rodriguez finished the trilogy that made him a star. Rodriguez is the ultimate do-it-yourself filmmaker. Rodriguez got his start as a young pre-teen who started making movies with his friends, and then he kept working on his talent as he got older. He began making short films, and then he finally wanted to make a feature-length movie. However, with no contacts and no connections, he had to find a way to pay for it by himself. His memoir, Rebel Without a Crew, reveals that he did clinical medical trials and saved up $7,000 to make his movie, El Mariachi.

Rodriguez sold that movie, made a sequel called Desperado within the studio system three years after El Mariachi was released, and then finished the trilogy when he released Once Upon a Time in Mexico on September 12, 2003.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico Finished the Story That Made Robert Rodriguez a Success

Rodriguez used money he made from medical testing and from his friend Adrian Kano to make El Mariachi with the sole intent of selling it in video stores for Spanish-language audiences. However, after he entered it at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award, Columbia Pictures acquired it, put more money into the film to clean it up, and then distributed it. This led to him getting a deal to make bigger movies. Three years later, he released Desperado, which starred Antonio Banderas as El Mariachi and Salma Hayek as his love interest, a movie that made her a star in America. After a pair of movies with Quentin Tarantino, he directed the studio picture The Faculty and then started producing his own films.

By 2003, Rodriguez was ready to return to the movie that made him a star, and he wrote and directed Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The cast here was incredible, with Banderas back as El Mariachi. In this story, he was recruited by CIA Agent Sands (Johnny Depp) to kill a corrupt Mexican Army general named Emiliano Marquez, who himself was hired to kill the President of Mexico in an attempted government overthrow. Mickey Rourke starred as Billy Chambers, an American fugitive, while Danny Trejo played El Cucuy, an ally who betrayed El Mariachi. Add in Eva Mendes, Enrique Iglesias, Cheech Marin, Willem Dafoe, and a returning Salma Hayek, and the cast was stacked.

When the movie was released, it made $98.8 million on a $29 million budget. It also had a 66% Rotten Tomatoes score, with a 64% audience rating.

The Success of the Mexico Trilogy Helped Rodriguez Create a Self-Made Studio

The Mexico Trilogy was a huge catalyst in what made Robert Rodriguez settle in as one of Hollywood’s most successful independent filmmakers. Between directing The Faculty for Miramax and making Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he slightly changed genres with the family-friendly Spy Kids movies, releasing three of them in three years. However, along the way, Rodriguez also decided to step away from studio filmmaking, and he started to do everything himself at his own Troublemaker Studios. This was a small production studio on Rodriguez’s home property in Austin, Texas, although it is now based at the former site of the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport.

After he finished the Mexico Trilogy, Rodriguez partnered with comic book creator Frank Miller to co-direct Sin City. Rodriguez actually resigned from the Directors Guild of America when they said he couldn’t name Miller a co-director, which cost him the job directing John Carter of Mars. The director didn’t let that stop him, and he went on to make several films through his studio, including The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lavagirl, Planet Terror, Machete, and many more. He even got to make a big-budget movie with James Cameron called Alita: Battle Angel.

None of this would have been possible if it weren’t for Rodriguez making a great debut film with El Mariachi, and this gave him the chance to finish the story as a trilogy. The director spent $7,000 of his own money, used a cast of mostly unknowns, and did what he could to make it look much bigger than it was. It allowed him to impress enough people to sign a major star like Antonio Banderas to star in his sequel, and he even made a star out of Salma Hayek at the same time. This all finally culminated 23 years ago, when Robert Rodriguez finished the story of a deadly man named El Mariachi, a warrior who made the director a major Hollywood player.

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