One of the big questions left on everyone’s lips since the failure of Grindhouse at the box office has been: where does this leave Sin City 2? Cinema Blend’s working theory has been that the flop of Grindhouse may have somehow soured the long standing relationship between Rodriguez and the Weinstein Company, which might account for all the confusion over whether or not the movie is happening. It seems we may have been right.
Cinema Blend insider Secret Squirrel sent me an email this morning with information dug up from deep inside Weinstein headquarters about what the heck is taking so long on Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City sequel. Since this is an anonymous source, consider everything below wild gossip until there’s some sort of official confirmation. That said, Secret Squirrel has been a pretty reliable source for us in the past.
Secret Squirrel claims that Sin City 2 is indeed in trouble because of the failure of Grindhouse. Well, not just the failure of Grindhouse but the failure of almost every other movie The Weinstein Company has put out since the formation of the company a couple of years ago. Remember, TWC is still a new studio, and though they’ve already put out dozens of films in their short lifespan, very few, if any of them have managed to turn much of a profit. Rumor has it that Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s investors are getting nervous. Our scooper says their investors "want assurance that they would get back a profit on their investments" before pouring money into another big project like Sin City 2.
Since the first Sin City actually made a fair amount of money, you’d think it would be a no brainer. Unfortunately, it sounds like for whatever reason Rodriguez may be taking the brunt of the blame for the failure of Grindhouse. Squirrel says, "Tarantino is still the golden boy for the Weinstein’s" and that’s why its his film Death Proof which is getting the grand treatment at Cannes while Robert’s Planet Terror is getting the middle finger. The ironic thing there is that most people seem to agree that it’s the ponderous Death Proof which weighed the whole thing down and Planet Terror which brought the house down for the few lucky enough to show up to a theater to see it. However, Tarantino is still the guy that made them billions with Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, while Rodriguez has had much more modest successes in the past. It looks like the Weinstein’s are determined to have QT’s back.
Meanwhile, our source claims Rodriguez has been circling projects like The Jetson and Land of the Lost as "an ego booster for him and his profile to impress the investors and possibly get new ones as well to pump up his other projects." It may also be why he settled on Barbarella, and thus why we’re stuck still waiting for Sin City 2 to happen.
If Secret Squirrel is right, then it looks like TWC has a lot of internal questions to answer before there’s any hope at all of Sin City 2 goes into production. It’s not dead, but if you’re hoping for more of Sin City any time soon you may be out of luck.
