It was only a few weeks ago we heard Mark Millar claim that a third Kick-Ass movie or a reboot of the franchise wasn’t in the pipeline, due to how spread out the rights and key creative talents are.
Millar has a deal in place with Netflix after the streaming service purchased Millarworld and proceeded to bungle Jupiter’s Legacy, while Vaughn is developing an entire espionage franchise for Apple that kicks off with the star-studded Argylle, on top of his Kingsman duties at Disney subsidiary 20th Century Studios, while Universal hold the rights to the comic book.
However, Vaughn has now revealed that he’s already got a plan in place to reinvent Kick-Ass from the ground up when he gets his hands on the property two years from now. Speaking during a roundtable interview to promote The King’s Man via ComicBook, the filmmaker teased that something major is already in store.
“Oh, you’ve got a big reboot, a big reboot of Kick-Ass in two years. Big reboot. … It’s so f*cking nuts that I can’t talk about it. But we’ve got that ready to go. All the rights revert back in two years and then we’re going to reboot it where people will be like, he is insane… Because I think the clue is in the title. I think Kick-Ass … it became a new type of genre. Everyone went like- whenever we made it, everyone was like, ‘Oh, you can’t make R-rated superheroes. No one will want to see an R-rated superhero. You can’t do this. You can’t do that.’
So, when we- I had to say ‘dare’ and it was so nuts that I went, ‘Yeah, great. It’ll cause just as much controversy and everyone will talk about it and as many people will love it will hate it.’ Um, but I’m not saying it hasn’t got the characters in it and won’t have, you know. I’m just saying it’s not what any of-anyone could be imagining what it is. And I’m going to need one very, very brave actor or actress to play the new Kick-Ass because it will scare the sh*t out of them.”
Quite how Vaughn is supposed to find the time to do all of this is anyone’s guess, especially when he’s already gearing up to shoot a third Kingsman with Taron Egerton, and Argylle is winding down principal photography. The second installment was a bit of a bust, but maybe a fresh coat of paint could help rejuvenate Kick-Ass, even if it seems very unlikely that Aaron Taylor-Johnson and ChloĆ« Grace Moretz would return given that they’ve aged out of their respective roles.