Not only was it Rodriguez’s first major hit, but it also spurred three successful sequels. 1 spot at the box office for three straight weekends and becoming, at that time, one of the biggest March debuts ever. Six years later - and with his subsequent films From Dusk till Dawn and The Faculty failing to fully establish his box-office bona fides - Spy Kids was his largest release to date, with his future prospects tied to the movie’s performance. “I thought, 'Wow, those kids look like little James Bonds!' And right there I thought of what would eventually become Spy Kids.” "I had Antonio there and Tamlyn Tomita playing his wife and these two kids who were dressed in tuxedos because the film was set on New Year’s Eve," he later recalled. Ironically, inspiration came in the midst of one of his career lowlights, the 1995 commercial dud Four Rooms. When Rodriguez hatched the idea for Spy Kids, he was trying to make the transition from super-low-budget mastermind ( El Mariachi) to a more mainstream filmmaker. "It’s so cool going back to ideas I had as a kid and seeing them come to computer-generated life." "Thumb Thumbs are something I invented when I was 13, and I won my first art contest," Rodriguez once said. Perhaps the character’s most memorable contribution to the franchise was his introduction of the Thumb Thumbs, his henchmen who (as you might imagine) were robots whose heads, arms, and legs are all thumbs. She was in the short-lived Alfred Molina sitcom Ladies Man.)Īnd like any great James Bond flick, the film had a top-notch villain, with Cumming playing a hammily good bad guy in Floop. (He had been in a few episodes of Murphy Brown. Vega and Sabara had been working in film and television, but Spy Kids helped make their name. Spy Kids featured a treasure trove of clever cameos from the likes of Teri Hatcher, Cheech Marin, Rodriguez regular Danny Trejo, Robert Patrick, Mike Judge, Tony Shalhoub, and even fellow Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater, but it's highlighted by the breakout performances from its two young stars. But when their parents are kidnapped by the evil talk-show host Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming), who wants to take over the world, the kids will have to rescue them.Īlong the way, they'll learn what their mom and dad used to do for a living - and get involved in the family business by utilizing some cool spy gadgets themselves. The movie, written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, starred Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara as Carmen and Juni, the precocious children of famed former spies Gregorio (Antonio Banderas) and Ingrid (Carla Gugino). To begin this new series, we'll be shining a spotlight on Spy Kids, which hit theaters on March 30, 2001. Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
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