When Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino first sat down to crack the story of From Dusk Till Dawn a quarter of a century ago, the duo more than likely had no idea that the blood-splattered homage to B-tier horror would end up launching a multimedia franchise that’s still going strong today.
From a tonal standpoint, the movie was about as crazy as you’d expect, with the first half playing out like a standard crime thriller before pivoting completely and diving headfirst into the vampire genre. Unsurprisingly, fans lapped it up and it became a bona fide cult classic, earning almost $60 million at the box office on a budget of less than $20 million and becoming a staple late-night guilty pleasure.
From Dusk Till Dawn then went on to spawn two direct-to-video sequels that were hardly anything to write home about, while Rodriguez also created a TV show for his El Rey Network that was much better than it had any right to be. The filmmaker recently teased a 4K remaster to celebrate the movie’s 25th anniversary, but he’s now dropped the bombshell that an animated series is also in the works.
“Over here, I have my own television network. So I had a television network here. And I needed to create programming, so Quentin and I still control the rights to it. So I went, ‘Oh, wow, I’d love to expand the story of Santánico Pandemonium, and the whole Aztec vampire lore for my network’.
And then internationally it was just put out as a Netflix original, I think is probably how you saw it. But here it was an original series for my television network, action television network called El Rey, which is, you know, the place they’re trying to get to at the end of From Dusk till Dawn so it fits perfectly. That was originally why we did it, so we did three seasons of that. And now we’re looking towards, we’re developing an animated From Dusk till Dawn.”
Rodriguez created and executive produced From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, and also had a hand in the writing process while directing seven of the 30 episodes, so he clearly still has a huge investment in the property. Having ceased to exist as a cable channel at the end of last year, though, El Rey is expected to return at some point in the future as a digital platform and presumably, this new animated venture will be one of the projects used to entice longtime fans and curious new viewers alike.
