Machete in Space Gets Surprising Update From Robert Rodriguez

It’s been over fifteen years since Grindhouse was released, but the love letter to exploitation cinema continues to live in unique ways despite being a massive commercial flop. With production set to begin very soon on Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, the first spinoff of the series could finally be returning. What began as a fake trailer became 2010’s Machete, which gave way to 2013’s Machete Kills. Though that sequel film was another disappointment financially, it teased a third film to round out the franchise with another fake trailer, Machete Kills Again…in Space. Talk has popped up every few years about the film and now Robert Rodriguez is back, noting that the fan demand for the film may be too much to ignore.

“Danny calls me all the time. He films a whole audience that he’s speaking to, and they’re all saying ‘Machete in Space!’” the director teased to Deadline. “That’s why I put a fake trailer for that on Machete 2, to kind of satisfy them. This is pretty much what it would look like, but you can see it in two minutes rather than two hours. And it never satisfies them, so we have to do it. But you know, the original was just a fake trailer on Grindhouse. I recorded the audience reaction and put it on the blu-ray of Planet Terror. You can’t hear half the trailer. When it first came up people were so shocked. Danny was the lead, Cheech was in it, they’re cheering so loud and we’re kind of taken aback. They’d never seen a Latin hero.”

He continues, “So they would bug us for five years, ‘When’s that movie coming out?’ I said, ‘It was a fake trailer.’ ‘No, but it looked real! When is it coming out?’ So we’ve got to make it for them. So five years later I made that movie. It wasn’t meant to be a film, the audience just wanted it. So we have to give it to them. Because when someone wants something that bad, I’ve never had that with any movie before. Now everyone’s still ‘Machete in Space!’ You can’t give ’em enough.”

 At one point it seemed like Machete Kills Again…In Space would actually happen, with Trejo saying back in 2015 that it was going to be filmed that year. It should go without saying that this didn’t happen though and that the lackluster box office of the 2013 sequel probably killed the franchise permanently (in addition to the 2018 bankruptcy of distributor Open Road Films). Like we said though, a trailer for this movie was produced and shown after Machete Kills.