Machete is an upcoming feature by Robert Rodriguez. It is an expansion of a fake trailer Rodriguez directed for the 2007 film Grindhouse. It will star Danny Trejo as the title character. Although originally announced to be released direct-to-DVD as an extra on the Planet Terror DVD, the film is now being produced as a theatrical release.

Production

At South by Southwest, Rodriguez announced that he would be expanding his trailer for Machete into a feature-length movie.

According to Rodriguez, the origins of the film go back to Desperado. He says, "When I met Danny, I said, 'This guy should be like the Mexican Jean-Claude Van Damme or Charles Bronson, putting out a movie every year and his name should be Machete.' So I decided to do that way back when, never got around to it until finally now. So now, of course, I want to keep going and do a feature. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Rodriguez said that he wrote the screenplay back in 1993 when he cast Trejo in Desperado. "So I wrote him this idea of a federale from Mexico who gets hired to do hatchet jobs in the U.S. I had heard sometimes FBI or DEA have a really tough job that they don't want to get their own agents killed on, they'll hire an agent from Mexico to come do the job for $25,000. I thought, "That's Machete. He would come and do a really dangerous job for a lot of money to him but for everyone else over here it's peanuts." But I never got around to making it.

Rodriguez hopes to film Machete at the same time as Sin City 2. Additionally, during Comic-Con International 2008, he took the time to speak about Machete, including such topics as: status, possible sequels after the release of Machete, and production priorities. It was also revealed that he has regularly pulled sequences from it for his other productions including Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Releases

Rodriguez also shared at Comic-Con that Machete will be a trilogy, the films are as follows:

• "Machete"
• "Machete Kills!"
• "Machete Kills Again!"

Other Appearances

As the film was initially scrapped, Rodriguez later recycled the character of 'Machete' in the children's film Spy Kids, in which the character is reformatted as the titular children's estranged uncle, an eccentric and reclusive inventor who uses his codename, Machete, as an official brand for his inventions. Cheech Marin - who starred in the Grindhouse trailer for Machete - also appeared as the children's fake Uncle, Felix, appointed by the OSS to replace Machete. The characters were later to appear in the film's sequels.

References

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