Coming by way of a recent interview with Empire magazine, Mark Millar; the writer of Kick-Ass; let the world know just what he’s got planned for a sequel to the film that saw an average high-school kid decide to dress up as a superhero and fight crime; should the current script ever make it into production.
And the question of a sequel being produced at all was a big one; because despite being directed by Matthew Vaughn (the director of Stardust, and Layer Cake), and co-written by Millar, Vaughn, and Jane Goldman (who’s currently writing X-Men: First class for Vaughn to direct), and having a huge amount of publicity, hype, and media attention (often for the controversy of having a pre-teen girl using words that only Crank’s Jason Statham, and the cast of Deadwood, should be allowed to utter), it had a fairly mediocre Box Office run, and was classed by many as a resounding disappointment.
However, despite the Box Office hiccup, the majority of reviews for Kick-Ass were generally positive (particularly when discussing the humour, and performance of 500 Days of Summer’s Chloe Grace Mortez), and sales of both Blu-ray and DVD copies have been much higher than first anticipated; meaning that Kick-Ass 2 (currently subtitled ‘Balls to the Wall’) has now been officially greenlit.
Mark’s said that looking at the strength of the DVD sales “it would be crazy not to” make a sequel, and hopes to begin production in around nine months “because Matthew Vaughn’s got to do X-Men: First Class, then hopefully we’ll just go straight into Kick-Ass 2”; which will pick up the story immediately after the events of the first movie.
His plans for the story involve having “gangs going all over NewYork filming atrocities on their cell phones and putting them on the internet, trying to outdo each other”, and making Red Mist into “a supervillain that made Heath Ledger’s Joker look like Cesar Romero’s Joker”; turning him into “Charles Manson as a supervillain, the worst of all supervilains, who calls himself ‘The Motherfucker.’”
Millar’s also expressed interest (via a Radio 5 interview) in having a big-name star such as Brad Pitt (Snatch), or Johnny Depp (Public Enemies), playing the nemesis in the next film; which will continue to follow the exploits of Dave (Aaron Johnson, Nowhere Boy) “as he gets deeper and deeper into his dangerous hobby, forms a gang” and ends the movie “with all the heroes versus all the villains, in a big gang-fight”; which has currently given pencilled in for release in 2012.
