Kick-Ass 2 Forum

Kick-Ass may have underwhelmed a bit at the domestic box office - although, really, $50 million bucks probably seems like a fortune for a hard-R movie where little kids get shot. Luckily, it's seemed to have made quite a bit more money on home video - up to $150 million when all is said and done. According to Bleeding Cool, Mark Millar has stated that that strong revenue has led to a greenlight for the sequel:

The estimate is [Kick-Ass] will do 100 to 150 million on DVD based on the American sales, you know, so it’ll end up making a quarter of a billion on a 28 million investment. So It should be okay. So the sequel’s greenlit, we can go ahead and do the follow up now, you know. The first made so much compared to what it cost it would be crazy not to.

So, yeah. I'm not super familiar with Kick-Ass 2: Balls To The Wall (its official title - I kind of like "Ass Harder" more, though), but from what I've seen of the comic, it involves Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl teaming up against a "supervillain" team of Red Mist and sundry other foes. Should be another good couple of hours of me desiring to bodily hurt Aaron Johnson! Other sources have indicated that the film will start filming in nine months or so. 
 
Millar also drops more info on the upcoming adaptation of his comic Nemesis, in that his wish list for the movie would be to have Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp as co-stars, and that Tony Scott is going to "give them a call". I'm sure that's true for virtually every movie that's in the development stage, though, so I wouldn't give too much credence to it until we learn who is actually cast. 

I loved Kick-Ass the movie... the comic was fine.  I think the problem with Millar writing in this style, meaning he writes a comic to make it a movie, is that the comic will most likely suffer and serve as nothing more than a amateur story-board attempt.  It somewhat insults the comic medium by making it the film's younger less-successful brother.  Comics and movies are different forms of sequential art which can reach different levels of artistry... they've done it before, but never anything Millar was involved in.  He's had great comics that are full of action and shocks, but nothing that elevates the medium beyond the stereotypical young-male fantasy. 
 
I wish he'd focus on comics, but I do understand that the comics industry is not where the money is.

I did not like the change they made from the comic to the movie with the love interest. In the comic the girl is supposed to kick him in the nuts and get him beat up when she finds out that he wasn't really gay and was just pretending to be to get with her, but in the god dam movie she just blushes and they start fucking. That one scene really ruined the movie for me, and just stank of Hollywood needing to have a god dam love story in every fucking movie.

Isn't Millar notorious for just making shit up in interviews?

I just appreciate the fact that the words "ass" and "balls" can be used together in the TITLE of a somewhat mainstream movie. This is progress in our society.
 
The creator of the Hays Code must be spinning in his motherfuckin' grave.

@crusader8463: You are correct sir!
 
Just one more reason for me to not give a fuck about the now almost cliche "what if real people were superheroes?" concept.
 
Kick-ass should have been the definitive movie about this, but instead we just got a little girl saying fuck a few times.

I liked Kick-Ass some, but the fact that Nicolas Cage can't come back for the sequel makes me automatically less interested in it.
 
Also I fucking hate Mark Millar, goddamn. I don't know what it is about him, apart from my hatred of nearly all his work and also his stupid face.

I really don't see why Millar bothers to do the books anymore, since they're really just screenplays released a bit earlier. Although he does have a little more free rein on what he can do in those than in the movies... But still. This is silly.

awesome, i loved the first one. i hope the score is as good as the first.

i hope for more Hit Girl, less Kick Ass

@Pickle:  Pretty much, yeah. Aaron Johnson was amazingly annoying in that movie.

It is always good to see a movie, that isn't direct feed for the least common denominator, get a sequel.

I'm not familiar with the comic books, but I really enjoyed the first film. Yes Rorie, even Aaron Johnson! ;) As long as they don't try and clone the first film's successes then I think it should be okay.

@Rorie: I dunno, I thought he was fine. But that's just me.

I loved kick-ass. 
More Aaron Johnson?
YES PLEASE

I don't understand all this hate for Aaron Johnson.  He was perfect for that role.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that he's the only guy who could have pulled it off, but it would have been much less ideal if say Jesse Eisenberg was Kick-Ass.  And Michael Cera's already in danger of overexposure, so people would probably complain even more about him being in it.  
 
Those are just some names that come to mind when I'm trying to think of "bankable" nerdy, awkward, early 20s character actors.  I liked the fact that they cast an actor who was essentially an unknown.  Obviously Chloe Moretz steals the show, but I think that is by design.
 
If anything, your hatred of Aaron Johnson should make you enjoy the movie more.

@Rorie: Not only that, but the character itself was terrible. 

I've met Mark Millar (shameless name drop) and I can almost guarantee that he'd agree with you on "Ass Harder." Seems like the exact kind of thing that would make him laugh heartily.

@crusader8463:   Yes, her reaction in the movie to finding out that he actually wasn't gay was a bit of a stretch.  I thought she would continue to beat his ass with the tennis racquet or something larger.  But a movie is a movie, they don't need a love story because it's required in Hollywood.  In my opinion I think they just used it here in order to give him a greater emotional need to move the story forward. 
 
The alternative, where she hates him for lying to her would have actually been too tedious as far as movies go.  It may work in the comic, but the way they deal with it in the movie is quick and efficient.  I prefer that they just resolve something like that quickly in an unexpected way than dwell on it for too long.  Because when they add more and more obstacles to them "falling in love," then it becomes even more of a love story.  And more conflict in a subplot means more shit that needs to be resolved or addressed in some way, which means more unnecessary emphasis on and screen-time devoted to trying to get the girl.  
 
When they fall in love, the stakes are raised, Kick-Ass has to think more and act more selflessly, which I think makes him a stronger character in the long run because he becomes more active than reactive.  Screenplays are of course different from novels, and therefore certainly different from graphic novels and comic books.  What works in one medium may not necessarily work in another.  They're going to take liberties with the source material somewhere along the line.  I understand that you don't want them fucking with it too much that it isn't even Kick-Ass anymore...but the other extreme, where the writers/directors are too faithful to it that it just becomes a replica isn't ideal either.  I don't think movie adaptations should be judged mostly or solely by their closeness to the source material.  But I respect that you may find some of the changes too egregious to be excused.

Here's to this sequel being superior to the comic as the first movie was to its inspiration. The premise is fine, but the execution... well, let's just say the best and worst thing about Mark Millar comics typically always tends to be Mark Millar. Other than Chosen pretty much everything he's done has been too self-indulgent and smacked of arrogance for its own good, and even then Chosen had those tendencies toward the end of the third act. If Matthew Vaughn comes back though, everything should be okay.