Kick-Ass Franchise Being Revived With A Versus Movie?
It looks like Kick-Ass is going to get another sequel. The original actors are coming back and will be pitted against each other for the new story
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Kick-Ass came along at a time when the superhero/ comic book genre was ripe for a little more graphic intensity, a little more humor, and a full-on R-rating. It’s easy to forget now as this genre has grown and expanded over the last decade, but there was a time when superheroes were strictly in the PG vein. And that’s why it’s cool news that Kick-Ass might finally be coming back with another sequel. Insider Daniel Richtman has it that there’s a follow-up planned and the original actors are on board.
The rumor specifically cites a Hit-Girl vs. Kick-Ass movie that would pit the two titular characters against each other. How it plays out or what causes the rift here isn’t clear. But that Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloe Grace Moretz are coming back into the fold is pretty exciting. Honestly, there probably isn’t another sequel without these two so the casting is likely a foregone conclusion on the announcement alone. But these days sometimes anything is possible when it comes to the superhero genre.
Kick-Ass was released in 2010 and directed by Matthew Vaughn. Based on the comic book of the same name, the title is also the name of the main character, the crime-fighting alter-ego of Dave Lizewski (Johnson). The movie took a funnier and bloodier approach to the superhero genre than had previously been on the screen.
Following two high schoolers and their crimefighting alter egos Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl, the film was more a dark comedy than anything else, juxtaposing these two “innocent” teens with the maximum damage they inflicted on their enemies. Here, check out the original trailer for Kick-Ass:
The original ran afoul of the early-ish internet mob even at the time. The language and the graphic nature of the film stood in stark contrast to Moretz specifically who was only 12 at the time of filming. That rubbed some folks the wrong way even though it played perfectly to a teenage crowd. And it still hit with its target audiences, scoring almost $100 million at the box office on its roughly $30 million budget while finishing at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Three years after the original, they did put out a sequel, Kick-Ass 2 which continued some of the original stories while also folding in some new characters as well. Vaugh turned the directing duties over to Jeff Wadlow but the film failed to reach the originals’ heights. It scored *just* $61 million at the box office and mostly bombed with critics at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes. That looked like the end of the line for the franchise.
But Kick-Ass was also careful to leave itself open for another sequel with both the protagonists and antagonists alike. It appears from this new rumor that the two main characters will come at odds with each other, but maybe we could also see Christopher Mintz-Plasse return as Red Mist. If the original cast is used then a timeline about a decade in the future could leave a lot of things to have gone wrong between the two (or three) over the years. There are a number of ways to bring an awesome new story for the two and essentially rebooting the franchise with a sequel. That’s the gift of having done the first movie when the two stars were so young.
If a Kick-Ass sequel is truly this close to happening, then we are likely to get a bunch of news coming down the pike in short order. And if Matthew Vaughn is, in fact, onboard to direct then maybe we recapture some of the original’s “magic”. If a second-helping was anything like the first go-around with the characters actually getting older, then we could see a film that would make Deadpool blush.
