It was still surprising that the allure of these directors, Rodriguez fresh off the success of Sin City and Tarantino from the Kill Bill duology, weren't enough for moviegoers. It had even gone into the weekend with an 86% score on Rotten Tomatoes - at the time the best reviewed film of the year. Some would argue that the film's opening on 2,600+ screens didn't give it enough of a push, others would say the 3 hour runtime limited the number of times it could be screened per day - both valid reasons.

Perhaps though, it was the audacity of the project's aims itself, and the perceived willingness of the public to get around the directors' vision. In a 2015 interview with Vulture, Tarantino stated of the project:

Robert Rodriguez and I had gotten used to going our own way, on these weird roads, and having the audience come along. We’d started thinking they’d go wherever we wanted. With Grindhouse, that proved not to be the case. It was still worth doing, but it would have been better if we weren’t caught so unaware by how uninterested people were.

In the end, Grindhouse obtained a cult following through being a tribute to exploitation cinema, over the mainstream dominance it had desired via exploiting the namesake of its creative team. It could be said that in the end, Rodriguez and Tarantino simply aimed too high with their ambitions, seeking to market Grindhouse as a full-on retro event and not just a film (a plan for nationwide midnight screenings was suddenly cut back to just 13 locations only days before release). Looking at the careers of both directors, who have repeatedly borrowed elements of genre films from the 70s and 80s in their work, one wonders how they of all people weren't able to maximize that approach to another level.

While it's fun to think about a world where the film became a hit, spawning a Grindhouse cinematic universe in which a different pair of directors would revisit this weird era of cinema every year, it would seem that time has passed. In a world where the very nature of the theatrical experience itself is struggling to keep itself afloat against competition from VOD and the Internet, the idea of a nostalgia-induced return to gritty, sensational escapism is lost on the modern moviegoer. Thankfully, the full, original cut of Grindhouse is available on DVD/Blu-ray, preserving its status not only in the filmographies of its directors, cast, and crew, but in the greater construct of genre cinema history itself.