'Sin City,' 'Machete' sequels in the works, says Robert Rodriguez

There's a whole subgenre of Movies Robert Rodriguez Never Got Around to Making. At various times in the last decade, the filmmaker was attached to/was working on/was caught on a microphone musing about the possibility of a Red Sonja remake, a Barbarella remake, an adaptation of the cult comic Madman, and an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. (So he dodged at least one bullet.) Still, last summer at Comic-Con he promised me to my face that he was working on a pair of Machete sequels, a remake of the animation classic Heavy Metal, and a long-promised Sin City sequel, and apparently he wasn't kidding.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Austin-based filmmaker announced that he would begin filming a new Machete movie — tentatively titled Machete Kills — next month. He also said that Sin City 2 will film this summer, so put that grain of salt in your pipe and smoke it.

More intriguingly, Rodriguez announced that he was expanding his basement empire with the formation of Quickdraw Animation, which has two films in production. One is a family movie with an undisclosed title; the other is Heavy Metal, which will presumably maintain the multi-filmmaker anthology structure of the original film. Perhaps realizing that he hadn't accounted for the possibility of the universe suddenly expanding into a nine-day week, Rodriguez also took the opportunity to discuss plans to launch his own cable network, which will be called "El Rey."

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