Oh, Matthew Vaughn, you of the oh-so-classy anal sex joke in “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” and other cinematic vulgar offenses (much of the dialogue in “Kick-Ass” for example).The filmmaker is arguably getting a touch of Mark Millar syndrome, which would be fitting in that most of his movies are comic book adaptation of Millar’s crass and offensive works. Millar of course has boy-who-cried-wolf overpromise syndrome—like claiming that Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp would probably star in the never-actually-made production of his “Nemesis” comic among many other fibs or massive exaggerations.
Vaughn doesn’t seem to have gotten the hint. His adaptation of Millar’s “Kick-Ass” grossed a paltry $48 million domestically in 2010 (less than $100 million worldwide). Wisely, Lionsgate didn’t want to do anything with a sequel, but Universal, listening too much to the fanboy chatter, decided to pony up the money for a sequel a few years after the fact. The conventional wisdom being: sequels are simply a brand and now that the brand is well-known, it has a following, the previous movie did well on home video, so a sequel should make more money. And maybe 80% of the time, sequels do which is why Hollywood is so obsessed with them.
But “Kick-Ass 2” actually performed way worse at the box-office, grossing almost half of the first one domestically ($28 million, the same as its reported budget) and only $80 million worldwide. Evidently no one told Vaughn of the movie’s miserable failure as he recently told Yahoo U.K. outlet that he is hoping to make two more “Kick-Ass” related films.
“We’re working on an idea for a prequel of how did Hit Girl and Big Daddy become Hit Girl and Big Daddy,” he told the British outlet.“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’.”
Seriously? Ok, but good luck with your Kickstarter campaign cause I dunno what studio is going to pay another $20-ish million for a twice underperforming franchise (Universal has learned their by lesson now). You can watch Vaughn’s comments below.
