Fresh off his stint on Disney+’s Star Wars series The Book of Boba Fett, Robert Rodriguez is returning to the world of Spy Kids! While the majority of the filmmaker’s work has been geared to the PG-13 and R crowd, 2001’s Spy Kids marked his first time helming a feature directed at families, and he sat back in the director’s chair for all of the following three installments. Now it’s been announced that Rodriguez has been brought aboard to put together what’s being described as a reimagining of the Spy Kids franchise.
Netflix has closed a deal with Skydance Media and Spyglass Media (which owns the Spy Kids franchise) to put together a new Spy Kids movie that will play exclusively on the streaming service. Robert Rodriguez will direct, write and produce this new feature that will “introduce the world to a new family of spies.” This is Rodriguez’s second time making a family film for Netflix, having previously delivered 2020’s We Can Be Heroes, a standalone follow-up to his 2005 movie The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D. We Can Be Heroes ended up being a huge hit for Netflix, and there’s a sequel on the way.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of a new Spy Kids movie being on the horizon. Back in January 2021, it was reported that Robert Rodriguez was striking up a deal with Skydance to make a new entry that would focus on a “multicultural family.” Evidently it took some time to find a home for the project, but a little over a year later, fans of the Spy Kids franchise will can look forward to watching the next installment with a Netflix subscription.
The first Spy Kids movie introduced Alex Vega’s Carmen Cortez and Daryl Sabara’s Juni Cortez, young siblings who were thrust into the spy game after their parents, Antonio Banderas’ Gregorio and Carla Gugino’s Ingrid, were kidnapped by the nefarious Fegan Floop, played by Alan Cumming. Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams and Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over followed in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and other members of the Cortez family we met during that original trilogy included Danny Trejo’s Isador Cortez (a.k.a. an alternate universe version of Machete), Ricardo Montalbán’s Valentin Avellan and Holland Taylor’s Helga Avellan. Then in 2011, Spy Kids: All the Time in the World came out, and while Vega, Sabara and Trejo reprised their respective roles, this time around the spotlight was pointed on the Wilson family, with its core members played by Jessica Alba, Joel McHale, Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook.
It’s worth noting that this Robert Rodriguez’s next Spy Kids movie won’t be the franchise’s first exclusive Netflix offering. An animated series called Spy Kids: Mission Critical aired for two seasons on the platform in 2018. However, the show was a reboot that depicted Carmen and Juni Cortez working at Spy Kids Academy to train a team of cadets to go up against S.W.A.M.P. (Sinister Wrongdoers Against Mankind's Preservation). It hasn’t been clarified yet if the upcoming movie will be set in the same reality as the previous Spy Kids movies or a full-blown reboot existing on its own, but either way, it’s gearing up to revive the franchise in a big way.
CinemaBlend will share any major concrete details about the new Spy Kids movie once they come in. For now, there’s no shortage of Netflix movies to check out, or you can look through our 2022 Netflix movie schedule to see what the streaming service will deliver later this year.
