There are plenty of franchises and would-be shared universes to have either overstayed their welcome or suffered so badly from the law of diminishing returns that putting them out to pasture is the only option left on the table, but Netflix and Robert Rodriguez remain convinced that Spy Kids isn’t one of them.
It’s been 22 years since the opening installment released, and the long-running series shows no signs of slowing down. Despite Rodriguez’s original trilogy being followed by sequel/soft reboot hybrid All the Time in the World almost a decade later, the filmmaker and streaming service remain adamant that there’s plenty of gas left in the tank.
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl is set in the same mythology as Spy Kids, but not even a critical drubbing and box office bombing could stop it being dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint via Rodriguez’s We Can Be Heroes, which turned out to be one of the platform’s most-watched original features ever and has a follow-up of its own in the works.
Reboot Spy Kids: Armageddon was announced a while back with Gina Rodriguez and Zachary Levi leading the cast, and it’s now been handed a vague “2023” release window of what we presume to be around Christmastime, after We Can Be Heroes dropped on December 25, 2021 and instantly became a smash hit.
Rodriguez said “it won’t be any earlier than August,” and while we’re putting two and two together, the festive period makes sense for the reboot of a trilogy that got a soft reboot and spawned an offshoot that itself got a legacy sequel in an all-round win for originality.