Little did director Robert Rodriguez know when he was cobbling together the $7,225 that it cost to make El Mariachi that two decades later, he’d be working on a movie with a reported price tag of $200 million, Alita: Battle Angel. Over the course of his career, Rodriguez has worked on projects of all shapes and sizes, ranging from goofy adventure movies for children to ultra-violent crime films for older audiences. He successfully transitioned to streaming at the right time and created a cottage industry in his backyard with his Troublemaker Studios. Now, one of Rodriguez’s biggest box-office hits is finding a new audience on streaming, nearly three decades after its original release.
The movie in question debuted theatrically in 1998 and served as the third installment in Rodriguez’s Mexico Trilogy. The series began with the scrappy El Mariachi, and continued with the studio-produced Desperado, which was released in 1995. Starring Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek, Desperado grossed nearly $60 million on a reported budget of $7 million. It received solid reviews and now holds a 71% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The site’s consensus reads, “Desperado contains almost too much action and too little of a story to sustain interest, but Antonio Banderas proves a charismatic lead in Robert Rodriguez’s inventive extravaganza.”
Collider Exclusive · Taylor Sheridan Universe Quiz Which Taylor Sheridan Show Do You Belong In? Yellowstone · Landman · Tulsa King · Mayor of Kingstown
Four worlds. All of them brutal, complicated, and built on power, loyalty, and the price of survival. Taylor Sheridan doesn’t write heroes — he writes people who do what they have to do and live with the cost. Ten questions will reveal which one of his worlds you were made for.
🤠Yellowstone
🛢️Landman
👑Tulsa King
⚖️Mayor of Kingstown
01
Where does your power come from? In Sheridan’s world, everyone has leverage. The question is what kind.
02
Who do you put first, no matter what? Loyalty in Sheridan’s universe is always absolute — and always costly.
03
Someone crosses a line. How do you respond? Every Sheridan protagonist has a line. What matters is what happens after it’s crossed.
04
Where do you feel most in your element? Sheridan’s worlds are as much about place as they are about people.
05
How do you feel about operating in the grey? Nobody in a Sheridan show has clean hands. The question is how they carry the dirt.
06
What are you actually fighting to hold onto? Every Sheridan character is fighting a war. The real question is what they’re defending.
07
How do you lead? Authority in Sheridan’s world is never given — it’s established, maintained, and constantly tested.
08
Someone new arrives and tries to change how things work. Your reaction? Every Sheridan show has an outsider disrupting an established order. Sometimes that outsider is you.
09
What has your position cost you? Nobody gets to where these characters are without paying for it. The bill is always personal.
10
When it’s over, what do you want people to say? Sheridan’s characters all know the ending is coming. The question is what they leave behind.
Sheridan Has Spoken You Belong In…
The show that claimed the most of your answers is the world you were built for. If two tied, both are shown — you’re complicated enough to straddle two Sheridan universes.
🤠 Yellowstone
🛢️ Landman
👑 Tulsa King
⚖️ Mayor of Kingstown
You are a Dutton — or you might as well be. You understand that some things are worth protecting at any cost, and that the modern world’s indifference to history, to land, to legacy, is not something you’re willing to accept quietly. You lead from the front, you carry your family’s weight without complaint, and when someone threatens what’s yours, you don’t escalate — you finish it. You’re not cruel. But you are absolute. In Yellowstone’s world, that combination of ferocity and loyalty doesn’t make you a villain. It makes you the only thing standing between everything that matters and everyone who wants to take it.
You thrive in the chaos of high-stakes negotiation, where the money is enormous, the margins are thin, and the wrong word in the wrong room can cost everyone everything. You’re a fixer — the person called when a situation is already on fire and needs someone with the nerve to walk into it. West Texas oil country rewards exactly what you are: sharp, adaptable, unsentimental, and absolutely clear-eyed about what people want and what they’ll do to get it. You’re not naive enough to think this world is fair. You’re smart enough to be the one deciding who it’s fair to.
You are a Dwight Manfredi — someone who has served their time, paid their dues, and arrived somewhere unexpected with nothing but their reputation and their wits. You adapt without losing yourself. You build loyalty through respect rather than fear, though you’re not above reminding people that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Tulsa King is for people who are still standing when everyone assumed they’d be finished — who find, in an unfamiliar place, that they’re more capable than the world gave them credit for. You don’t need a throne. You build one, wherever you happen to land.
You carry the weight of a system that is broken by design, and you do it anyway — because someone has to, and because you’re the only one positioned to do it without the whole thing collapsing. Mike McLusky’s world is for people who are comfortable operating where there are no good options, only less catastrophic ones. You speak every language: law enforcement, criminal, political, human. That fluency makes you invaluable and it makes you a target. You’ve made your peace with both. Mayor of Kingstown belongs to people who understand that keeping the peace is not the same as being at peace — and who do the job regardless.
Robert Rodriguez’s Neo-Western Is Taking Over HBO Max
But we’re talking about the trilogy-capper, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, a title which Quentin Tarantinocasually suggested as an homage to classic spaghetti westerns like Once Upon a Time in the West. Produced on a reported budget of nearly $30 million, the movie grossed almost $100 million at the box office. Banderas returned in the central role, with Hayek, Johnny Depp, Mickey Rourke,Eva Mendes, and Danny Trejo rounding out the supporting cast.
The movie received mixed reviews and now holds a 66% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Comparing the film to Sergio Leone‘s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, critic Roger Ebertwrote that “the Rodriguez epic is more interested in the moment, in great shots, in surprises and ironic reversals and closeups of sweaty faces, than in a coherent story.” According to FlixPatrol, it was among the 10 most-watched movies on the global HBO Max chart this week.
