Robert Rodríguez; “Spy Kids: All the Time in the World”
Kristy Sparow/Getty Images; The Weinstein Company/Courtesy Everett Collection
Robert Rodriguez isn’t opposed to bringing back original Spy Kids stars Alexa PenaVega and Daryl Sabara for another film. But the director says the time between the most recent installment, Armageddon, and 2011’s Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World meant it was “important to just restart the franchise.”
The filmmaker opened up about his decision to launch the latest chapter of Spy Kids with an entirely new family — and a new group of leading child stars — in a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment.
“I wanted to start a new family,” he said of the decision to cast Connor Esterson and Everly Carganilla in the new Netflix film, out Friday. “Because it was so long ago [since 2011’s All the Time in the World]“It was important to just restart the franchise and then move on.”
In Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World, PenaVega and Sabara starred alongside Jessica Alba, Joel McHale, Rowan Blanchard, Mason Cook, Ricky Gervais and Jeremy Piven. Alba portrayed an Organization of Super Spies agent who was married to McHale’s spy reporter. Vega and Sabara were the niece and nephew of Alba’s secret agent, whose stepchildren (Blanchard and Cook) face off against a villain threatening to use a time weapon called Project: Armageddon.
Although the director, also known for The Book of Boba Fett, Grindhouse and From Dusk Till Dawn, is interested in expanding the Spy Kids universe to include a new family, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about bringing back its former leading actors.
“I would like to bring it back [characters], I would like to connect the worlds. That would be so much fun,” he said. “It could still be in the same world. So if we make more films, old characters could easily come back.”
During the interview, Rodriguez also shared how important it is to be able to release another sequel to “Spy Kids” in Hollywood’s current storytelling climate. “It’s hard to make films in Hollywood that don’t do that [based on] a pre-existing material that belongs to a studio,” he said. “So if you can make up your own story and make sequels to it, man, you’re going to make as many of them as you can because it’s a rarity.”
The original 2001 film Spy Kids starred Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino as two spies who, after being kidnapped, must be rescued by their two children, played by PenaVega and Sabara. Since then, four more films have been released, including “Armageddon” and the animated series “Spy Kids: Mission Critical.”