The theatrical release schedule for the second half of 2013 is firming up, and an interesting–but unfortunate—head-to-head battle of the box office is set to occur in October.
First there’s Robert Rodriguez, whose long-awaited sequel to Machete, Machete Kills, has finally been given a drop date: September 13. Danny Trejo stars as Machete himself, a former Federale turned blade-wielding operative. This time, the President of the United States hires him to take down a revolutionary and an arms dealer. Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba reprise their roles from the earlier film; Sofía Vergara, Antonio Banderas, Alexa Vega and even Demián Bichir are joining up from Round Two. Hopes are high for this one; Rodriguez spent a paltry $10 million on the first Machete movie and it grossed more than $44 million in worldwide ticket sales–and that’s not including DVD sales, cable, or VOD.
But Rodriguez is just getting started. Three weeks later, on October 4, he and co-director Frank Miller are finally letting Sin City: A Dame to Kill For out of the bag. Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba (again) and Alexa Vega (again again) are just some of the Latinos starring in this second sequel from Rodriguez, yet another brash and ultra-violent comic book gone crazy. And just to make matters even more confusing, Alfonso Cuarón’s highly anticipated science fiction epic Gravity is premiering the same day as Sin City II, in 2D, 3D, and IMAX, no less. Fans have been waiting a long time for this: Gravity was originally scheduled for a November 2012 release, and Warner Bros. originally pushed it to Spring to “give more room” to other big Winter releases, like The Hobbit, Argo, Gangster Squad, and The Great Gatsby. Irony of ironies, half those other movies moved downstream as well. Gangster Squad finally appeared (to disappointing b.o. numbers) earlier in January, and Gatsby won’t show up ’til springtime (May 10, to be exact), so all the shifting may have been unnecessary.
Gravity has Cuarón all over it. Not only did he direct, he co-wrote the screenplay (along with his son Jonás Cuarón and Rodrigo García), he is also one of the producers and co-editor (with Mark Sanger). There seem to be only two actors (and a couple of voices) in the whole of this survival-in-space story–George Clooney and Sandra Bullock—whose characters are stranded in space after their space shuttle crashes; the brunt of the story surrounds Bullock’s medical engineer. The October 4 release puts the pic against Weinstein/Dimension’s Sin City sequel, Relativity’s Paranoia and Disney’s Vince Vaughn-starrer The Delivery Man.
Thats a lot to see–almost too much to choose from. But one thing’s for sure: it promises to be a lot more lively for Latino actors at the movies in Fall 2013 than it was in Fall 2012.
