The Mexican master of disaster may have met his match, as ‘Machete Kills’ has been well and truly left for dead at the US box office.
Despite a $20 million marketing campaign and a star-studded cast, the sequel to the 2010 action comedy from director Robert Rodriguez – itself a spin-off of 2007’s ‘Grindhouse’ – has taken only $3.8 million from North American cinemas since opening this past Friday, 11th October. According to Box Office Mojo, that’s “one of the worst openings ever for a movie in over 2,500 locations, and it’s also one of the worst openings of 2013.”
It seems the combined star power of (amongst others) Danny Trejo, Mel Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Amber Heard, Lady Gaga, Sofia Vergara and Charlie Sheen (jokingly credited by his birth name ‘Carlos Estevez’ in honour of the Hispanic theme) simply were not enough to compete against ‘Gravity’ and ‘Captain Philips,’ both of which performed handsomely.
Stats for the UK box office are not available just yet.
Publicity for ‘Machete Kills’ has been rampant on the cult film-oriented sites for some time, with a slew of character posters highlighting the many stars of the B-movie homage, with unsurprising stress on the many attractive women in the cast. Recent weeks have seen particular emphasis on the presence of Alexa Vega, the former child actress star of Rodriguez’s ‘Spy Kids’ movies, taking on a notably more mature (in other words, scantily clad and sexually provocative) role.
From a fandom perspective, then, perhaps overkill is to blame for the movie’s underperformance. As Box Office Mojo suggest, the problem might be “quite simply, the joke is played out. Audiences got their fill of tongue-in-cheek grindhouse thrills with ‘Grindhouse’ and the first ‘Machete,’ neither of which did particularly good business anyway.”
This might not bode well for the planned third instalment, ‘Machete Kills Again – In Space!’ Or does it…?
I can’t help thinking it would be a bit premature to declare the ‘Machete’ franchise, and/or the grindhouse revival to be dead just yet. As widely noted, the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration ‘Grindhouse’ was itself a flop on release, taking a little over $25 million worldwide on the back of a $67 million production budget (and no doubt a good deal more in publicity costs).
Even so, the subsequent six years have seen the grindhouse aesthetic catch on like wildfire, inspiring innumerable low-budget B-movies all around the world, most of which have skipped cinemas but done great business on DVD: to name but a few, we’ve had ‘Bitch Slap,’ ‘Hobo with a Shotgun,’ ‘Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman’ – and of course ‘Machete,’ itself a feature length adaptation of the fake trailer which opened ‘Grindhouse.’
Nor, as noted, did ‘Machete’ do especially huge business, though it more than recouped its $10.5 million budget with a global box office gross of just over $44 million.
Curiously, for a movie to be perceived as a commercial flop can actually prove beneficial to its cult status; it hammers home the sense that it is a movie intended for a more discerning audience who appreciate it on a deeper level. Yes, this is true even of movies as self-consciously silly as the ‘Machete’ series!
As the ‘Machete Kills’ tagline has it – ‘Left for dead: back for more!’ So who knows, perhaps we haven’t seen the last of Danny Trejo’s bloodthirsty anti-hero and his deluge of pretty young co-stars.
