Filmmaker Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy Kick-Ass is a wonderfully subversive, thrilling spin on the superhero genre. Director Jeff Wadlow’s sequel, Kick-Ass 2, is an ugly, mean-spirited bore of a film. The anticipated follow-up was a flop with both audiences and critics when it hit theaters—even one of its stars refused to promote it. Vaughn was busy with X-Men/Kingsman at the time, which is why he didn’t return to direct, but it appears that there’s hope yet for a franchise turnaround in the future.
Speaking with Yahoo! UK, Vaughn revealed that he’s still eager to dive back into the Kick-Ass universe:
“I’m not happily done with the franchise, for sure. Kick-Ass is a really important film to me and I’m very proud of it, and we would like to dip our toe back into it—when I say ‘we’ I mean Mark [Millar] and I and the team.”
But with the bad taste of Kick-Ass 2 in everyone’s mouth, how does Vaughn intend to reinvigorate audience interest? With a prequel, of course:
“We’re working on an idea for a prequel of how did Hit Girl and Big Daddy become Hit Girl and Big Daddy. If we make that, hopefully that will be the sorbet for the people that didn’t like Kick-Ass 2, and then we can go off and make Kick-Ass 3. But I think we’ve got to do this prequel just to regain the love that we had with Kick-Ass.”
So it’s clear that Vaughn is keen on making more Kick-Ass, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will happen. The original film was a gamble for Universal Pictures in that it was an R-rated superhero movie with an adolescent girl doing unspeakably violent things. When handled carefully, that works. But when fumbled, it’s a disaster (see: Kick-Ass 2). It’s unclear if Universal would be eager to make that gamble once more, especially after Kick-Ass 2 only grossed $28.7 million domestically.
But even if Universal did want to make a Kick-Ass prequel or sequel, it would still be a few years off. As previously reported, Vaughn is currently hard at work writing Kingsman 2, which he hopes to direct. Now that’s a follow-up I think we can all agree on. Watch the video of Vaughn discussing the future of Kick-Ass below.
