Matthew Vaughn has franchise fever right now. Not only is Kingsman still going strong, but he has hopes of connecting it to his latest spy movie, Argylle, and building a cinematic universe. But if that happens, Vaughn tells ThePlaylist that it won’t be just those two franchises, but possibly two more spy projects that he wants to bring into the mix…
“I’ve done the Kingsman. Hopefully, we have more ‘Kingsman,’ and we’ve got the world of ‘Argylle,’ and there are two other spy things I’m looking at,” Vaughn said.
“So you’re going well; well, Marvel and DC created these universes that are superheroes; why can’t we do it with spies? So that’s part of the plan,” he added.
That could be a long shot, though, given Argylle‘s poor reception at the box office. Costing roughly $200M, the Apple film only earned $18M last weekend. It’s hard to see Apple wanting to invest in sequels.
Vaughn has more up his sleeve, though. There’s also Kick-Ass 3, which we know is a planned reboot with an entirely new cast. While it shouldn’t come as a surprise since Jeff Wadlow directed the previous film more than a decade ago, but Vaughn won’t be directing this new one, either.
“I have a director, I have the cast, I have the concept,” he revealed to ThePlaylist again on their podcast.
“I just have to— it’s pretty extraordinary,” Vaughn said, beginning to explain why he won’t direct it. “Every time I do these interviews, everyone’s always asking about all these millions of movies that we should or could be making, but I’ve just got to put some infrastructure in my life because being the one-man band and playing all the instruments…a) I’m getting too tired, but b) you know, there’s no such thing as a one-man orchestra, and that’s what we need to build right now.”
The problem with doing another Kick-Ass (and newly adapting anything penned by comics writer Mark Millar, who also did Wanted and Kingsman) is finding something fresh to say. When the film arrived in 2010, Hollywood was only about two years into its obsession with Marvel and DC superhero movies. Already, they were feeling very stale and homogenized, and Kick-Ass was like a foot in the ass of the genre. But the landscape has changed. We have R-rated shows like The Boys out there, and traditional superhero movies are less popular than they’ve ever been. What is there to say now?
“The most important line in’ Kick-Ass’ was… two lines [were]… ‘why does everyone want to be Paris Hilton, no one wants to be Spider-Man’—which I think is fascinating because remember that was a new thing… the whole reality star thing, that was a big thing, and ‘With no power comes no responsibility,’ so those were the two hooks.”
“So we’ve taken those two ideas, and we [now] have to reflect,” he continued. “’ Kick-Ass,’ the reboot is a reflection of the world we now live in and what’s happened to superhero films and comics and where we are now.”
“‘Kick-Ass’ was a, ‘Hey, this is new and fresh and new way of looking at [things],’ so we’ve had to do that again. So all I can say is people will be very surprised. And I didn’t want to go back to the world of ‘Kick-Ass’ just to do a ‘Kick-Ass 3,’ and it’s the same, but it’s not the same. It’s not what anyone expects, but there will be enough in it for people to go, ‘OK, that’s different, but it’s pretty damn cool.’”
So a lot of irons on the fire for Vaughn, but I would caution that some of this stuff may have passed their expiration dates. I’m pretty sure Argylle is dead in the water, and we shouldn’t forget that audiences had already moved on from Kick-Ass by the time the sequel arrived just three years later. Kingsman is coming off the disappointing prequel, The King’s Man, so it’s also got some rebuilding to do.