Robert Rodriguez’s Machete has been in the can for a few months, nosing around for a distributor while Robert moved on to his Predator producing duties. The strangely star-studded cast (a 2010 trend, it seems) and online enthusiasm apparently piqued the interest of a number of studios which resulted in, what Variety frames as, a “bidding war.” How intense the back-and-forth became over a spin-off of a failed esoteric genre film I don’t know, but there you go.

20th Century Fox apparently slid the number with the most zeros across the table though, and thus will be taking on distribution duties for what was once a quickie DTV toss off, but has become something of a legit release. What kind of roll-out (my business) the film will get is unclear, but there’s no reason that Fox can’t make a few bucks marketing off of the bigish names and cheap action.

There’s definitely a chance that Machete will be a fun, violent romp that manages to be something beyond a note-for-note expansion of the trailer, even if that chance is slim. I have a strong feeling that Rodriguez is playing extremely loose with the Grindhouse aesthetic (as he did with Planet Terror) if he hasn’t dumped it entirely (also likely). If Roth ever makes Thanksgiving happen, I would expect that to be the spin-off that remains slavishly dedicated to the 42nd Street style.

At the end of the day, we could always do a lot worse than Danny Trejo ceaselessly destroying things and persons.

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