8 Years Ago, A Promising Comic Book Franchise Went Off the Rails, And It May Never Recover

In a media landscape that’s very nearly reached its saturation point with superhero comic adaptations, any time a new piece of intellectual property can break through the noise, it feels like a breath of fresh air. The challenge, of course, is that anything new is also, inherently a gamble. Even in the MCU – that most impenetrably strong of brands – slight deviations like Thunderbolts* and Eternals (both excellent movies) leads to underperformance. So when a new franchise does break through, it’s all the more impressive. It also hurts more when that initial potential isn’t followed up on.

When Kingsman: The Secret Service, adapted from the graphic novel The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, premiered in 2014, that certainly felt like the case. The first Kingsman was chock-full of fun, stylized action, cheeky humor, a stellar creative team, and fresh faces that made the movie a hit with both fans and at the box office. The Secret Service grossed a massive $414 million globally against its $81 million budget and launched the career of Taron Egerton, therefore, a sequel felt inevitable, and a franchise along the lines of John Wick seemed likely too. Frustratingly, it all went a bit wrong.

Where the Kingsman Franchise Went Wrong

When Kingsman: The Golden Circle released three years later, it followed a similar formula – same writers/directors to deliver on Kingsman‘s raunchy sense of humor, a star-studded cast, and tons of action. Yet the film, albeit narrowly, failed to match the first Kingsman‘s box office gross, and was significantly less well-received by both critics and audiences alike. While the first movie was certified fresh by critics on Rotten Tomatoes and boasted an impressive 84% audience rating, The Golden Circle scored twenty points lower with both groups. The sequel’s poor performance was a head-scratcher for sure, given that Matt Vaughn, the visionary behind Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class directed both films, and he, along with writing partner Jane Goldman, penned both Kingsman scripts.

The biggest complaint surrounding The Golden Circle is that it failed to capture the fun and originality that the first Kingsman delivered on in spades. The Secret Service is an origin story, and we follow the street-wise but directionless Eggsy Unwin (Egerton) enter, and ultimately embrace the world of old English-inspired espionage. In The Golden Circle, Vaugn and Goldman certainly put Eggsy up against it, he loses his mentor, the Kingsman infastructure and his friends in one brutal sequence in the film’s first act. Therefore, him and one of the few survivors, Kingsman’s resident “man in the chair” Merlin (Mark Strong), seek support from their American cousins, who aptly call themselves Statesmen.

Although Pedro Pascal and Channing Tatum play the delightful American agents Whisky and Tequila, and Julianne Moore does her very best to try and fill the shoes Sam Jackson’s quirky yet completely deadly villain left vacant in The Secret Service, the Kingsman sequel failed to build on the characters and relationships we’d invested in over the first movie and instead, lobbed a new cast at us without any of the freshness.

So much of what made The Secret Service work was the mentor-mentee relationship between Eggsy and veteran Kingsman agent Harry Hart, yet The Golden Circle deprives us of the key relationship for most of the film without providing a satisfying alternative. The movie made the gag of Eggsy sleeping with a Swedish princess at the end of The Secret Service into a major plotpoint in the sequel, where most fans probably would have preferred to see how Eggsy’s friendship with fellow Kingsman recruit Roxy evolve in The Golden Circle, since so much more narrative time and energy had been spent on her in the first movie.

Kingsman‘s Future Doesn’t Look Bright

In the years since Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Egerton has only become a bigger star, earning a Golden Globe for his performance as Elton John in Rocketman, plus Vaughn and Goldman no longer appear to be collaborating together. Perhaps that why instead of telling the next chapter of Eggsy’s story, Vaughn opted to dive into the origin of Kingsman itself in the prequel The King’s Man in 2021. Again, the filmmaker seemed to assemble all the right ingredients: the next big thing playing the protagonist (though this time it was Harris Dickinson instead of Egerton), punchy, stylized action sequences, and a who’s who of British character actors for the supporting cast.

However, The King’s Man received the lowest reviews from critics of the Kingsman films to date and grossed a paltry $125 million globally. Though it’s important to point out that the COVID pandemic undoubtedly played a part in The King’s Man lackluster gross, the prequel’s misfire seems to prove that Kingsman doesn’t have the franchise power we once thought it could possess. Vaughn’s latest comedic spy thriller, Argylle bombing at the box office last year only seemed to add insult to injury.

As for that third chapter of Eggsy’s story, both Egerton and Vaughn have told the press its in the works. According to IMDB, there’s a title, Kingsman: The Blue Blood and it officially entered pre-production earlier this year. Even so, with such a long gap between films, one has to wonder if they can draw back fans of the first Kingsman to the theaters, and whether another movie in the franchise will serve to redeem Kingsman, or just serve as another nail in its cinematic coffin.

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