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Having arrived on the scene with a bang, it wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that the Kingsman franchise has lost a lot of its luster over the last few years for a variety of reasons.
Sequel The Golden Circle may have nigh-on matched its predecessor at the box office, but the reception from critics and audiences nosedived, while third installment The Blue Blood has been struggling to make its way out of development hell. Creator Matthew Vaughn’s ambitious plans covered countless movies and even TV shows, but The King’s Man ended up failing on virtually every front.
Initially scheduled for release in December 2019, the prequel finally arrived in theaters 25 months behind schedule, only to bomb at the box office by earning just $126 million and score the worst reviews of the trio. Despite ending on an insane stinger that set up Adolf Hitler as an MCU-style villain for the follow-up, there wasn’t much outward interest in seeing it happen.
Vaughn doesn’t seem to be bothered, though, revealing to Collider that he’s still planning on making a sequel to the prequel as well as Taron Egerton’s third Eggsy adventure, even though Argylle sees him soon diving right back into the world of international espionage.
“The King’s Man was originally meant to be a TV series and I got persuaded to make it as a film. What we wanted to do was something like The Crown but with espionage and a bit of a Kingsman hit going through all of the decades. The next one it’s it is about the rise of Hitler, and how Hitler did come to power and basically was supported by the English aristocracy.
So I was like, ‘well that’s interesting’ and how the world was worrying so much about Communism, that Fascism rose up. And I look at the world at the moment, everyone getting distracted and worrying about this [and that] and if you worry too much about [this] bad things can happen here. So it is a story that I think needs to be recalled. We’re calling it The Traitor King.”
Does the world need another Kingsman prequel, this time with added Hitler? Time will tell, but at the very least you can’t fault Vaughn’s commitment to the property.