Matthew Vaughn knows you didn’t like Kick-Ass 2. In fact, he knows you didn’t like Kick-Ass 2 so profoundly, so deeply, so rightly, that he would like to provide you with a “sorbet” (really, his wording) to cleanse your palate and prepare you for more mayhem. That icy treat? A prequel all about Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. (Throws fancy sorbet bowl across the room.)
Vaughn directed the first Kick-Ass back in 2010, a gleefully adult imagining of what would happen if a seemingly regular kid tried to become a superhero, as adapted from the popular Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. comic-book series. The film nearly broke $100 million at the box office and, despite somewhat squicky subject matter, managed to pull off mainly positive reviews. (It’s currently sitting at 76 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, fresh enough.) In 2013, Jeff Wadlow took over the franchise and lensed Kick-Ass 2, which made just a hair over $60 million at the box office, while also garnering a bevy of, frankly, pretty pissed off reviews. (It’s hovering around 30 percent at Rotten Tomatoes, and a quick zip through Rotten reviews turns up wording like “disastrous,” “humorless,” and “rough.”)
How then to best recapture audience goodwill? Why, by making more!
Vaughn recently sat down to chat with Yahoo! Movies UK (incidentally, about Kingsman: The Secret Service, which is everything Kick-Ass 2 should have been), and he told the outlet that he’s “not happily done with the franchise.” (I am also not happily done with the franchise, but that doesn’t mean I want to see more of these movies.)
The filmmaker shares that his potential plans include both a prequel and a sequel, telling the outlet, “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…I think we’ve got to do this prequel to regain the love that we had with Kick-Ass.”
Yet, when Mark Millar was asked about these new properties by /Film, he gave a more, well, measured response:
“There’s really nothing happening here in any official way. Matthew is talking about an idea we had for Hit-Girl but it’s just been a few informal chats and we haven’t discussed Kick-Ass 3 at all. We’re getting Superior together at the moment and Matthew is putting some Kingsman sequel ideas together but Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass are not on our radar I’m afraid.”
While I admire Vaughn’s candor about Kick-Ass 2—people didn’t like it! it made me feel physically dirty!—and I can’t really fault the guy for wanting to make a third film (the comic spans three series, so there’s plenty of source material to lean on), it’s hard to imagine a film I want to see less than a prequel about Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. That ground has been covered in just two films and, just to add still more complications, we learn more about Hit-Girl’s real past in the third Kick-Ass comic series. It’s a big part of that story, which means that Vaughn might be cooking up two Hit-Girl-centric stories to shove down our throats in the interest of making fans love the films again. That’s enough, Vaughn, we’re full.