At the end of last year, Robert Rodriguez‘ new family film, We Can Be Heroes, hit Netflix and it was reported that 44 million households viewed the movie in its first couple of weeks on the streaming service. Due to the movie’s success, it was no surprise to hear Rodriguez was in development with Netflix for a sequel. According to a new report from Collider, Rodriguez is officially directing the follow-up next year.
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“They’ve been shocked at how well it’s kept doing. They call it unstoppable,” Rodriguez told Collider when speaking about Netflix. “They’ve never seen any movie behave like that. It just will not stop. Kids will just not stop watching it. And I think it happened with the Spy Kid movies, but you couldn’t ever keep track of it, because you can’t tell how many times kids watch it on VCR or watch on Disney channel. But now with their metrics, they can tell how many times a household is watching something again and again, through completion. Which a lot of the times when it’s been a big opening weekend, it didn’t mean people actually watched the whole movie. It means they watched five minutes or more.”
He added, “The completion rate was really high, but also the repeat rate was just off the charts, because kids just will watch it in the morning before school and after school every day. So yeah, they definitely want a sequel, which I’m working on, because it’s a new franchise for them. That behaves very differently. But kids crave empowerment and those movies just hit those buttons.”
“My most rabid fanbase all these years, by far, has been my kid films. My Spy Kids audience,” Rodriguez shared at Cinema-Con last year. “These kids watch those movies over and over because they’re action films made for children and families, in particular at a time when they need empowerment. Netflix came to me because the Spy Kids movies had done just so well on their service. They said ‘Could you make a series of films that do that?’ And I said, ‘I’d love to!’”
We Can Be Heroes starred Pedro Pascal, Christian Slater, and Boyd Holdbrook as some of Earth’s biggest heroes. The movie also featured Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Christopher McDonald, Adriana Barraza, Vivien Blair, Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Akira Akbar, Lyon Daniels, Nathan Blair, Lotus Blossom, Hala Finley, Andy Walken, Dylan Henry Lau, Andrew Diaz, Taylor Dooley, Sung Kang, Haley Reinhart, J. Quinton Johnson, Brittany Perry-Russell, Brently Heilbron, and JJ Dashnaw.
The first We Can Be Heroes is now streaming on Netflix.
