Tradecraft: As Many as 7 New Kingsman Movies in the Pipeline

Deadline reports that Marv Films (Matthew Vaughn's UK-based production company) "is plotting 'something like seven more Kingsman films' as part of the company’s expansion plans." That's... ambitious! But other spy franchises have certainly sustained that many or more. At least one of those seven films is expected to be a spinoff centered on the American spies (including Channing Tatum and Jeff Bridges) introduced in the second movie, Statesman. If previous plans mooted by Vaughn are still in effect, another is likely to be a third and supposedly final movie about the characters from the first two films, Eggsy (Taron Edgerton) and Harry Hart (Colin Firth), said to close out that trilogy. 

The next Kingsman movie we see will definitely be the WWI-set prequel The King's Man, long in the can and delayed by the global pandemic. That's currently slated for February, but likely to change again. It stars Harris Dickinson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Tom Hollander, and Daniel Brühl. With a cast like that an an exciting new time period less well mined by other spy franchises (and even a more serious tone judging from the trailers), I'm hopeful some more of these upcoming Kingsman films are sequels to The King's Man. Perhaps Dickinson and Fiennes will get as many movies as Edgerton and Firth.

According to Marv Group CEO Zygi Kamasa (per the trade), the company also has a Kingsman TV series in the works. 

Trailer: THE KING'S MAN (2020)

So far each Kingsman trailer has gotten me excited, and then each movie has disappointed me. But now they've done it again! Even after being burnt twice, I'm still on the edge of my seat waiting for director Matthew Vaughn's latest excursion into that world, this time a prequel set in the early 20th century. I'm a real sucker for WWI-era spy stories, and there are altogether too few. So despite my misgivings about the contemporary Kingsman movies, this trailer has me 100% on board for The King's Man!

The King's Man opens on Valentine's Day 2020, having moved into that slot (previously occupied by Bond 25, which then jumped to April) from fall 2019 after the Disney acquisition of Kingsman studio Fox.

Obviously none of the characters from the first two Kingsman movies, set in the present, appear in this one (which will depict the birth of the organization), so there's an all-new cast including Harris Dickinson (Trust) as Conrad, the WWI-era equivalent of Eggsy, Ralph Fiennes (Skyfall), Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace), Rhys Ifans (Snowden), Matthew Goode (Cambridge Spies), Daniel Brühl (Captain America: Civil War), Djimon Hounsou (Alias), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass), Charles Dance (For Your Eyes Only), and Tom Hollander (The Night Manager) in a triple role as Royal cousins King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.

Full Trailer: KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

Last week we saw the weird, but kind of neat, "teaser for the trailer" for Kingsman: The Golden Circle; now we can watch the full trailer. I certainly enjoy that returning director Matthew Vaughn is unabashedly going full Roger Moore Bond here, because it's nice to have something filling that void while the actual Bond movies are doing something different. And who doesn't love a London cab sprouting a gatling gun? But I do wish Vaughn had been a little more creative in his take on Bondian classics. For example, did the car have to transform into a submarine in the exact same way Moore's Lotus does in The Spy Who Loved Me? I just fear that a generation unfamiliar with Seventies Bond might now grow up thinking of that as a Kingsman thing rather than appreciating the allusion. (Personally, that sequence in the trailer reminds me more of a similar one in a James Tont Eurospy movie, but I'm pretty sure that's not the actual reference Vaughn was aiming for.) Such petty gripes aside, though, it all looks pretty cool, and despite not caring for the first Kingsman movie I retain high hopes for the sequel! After all, it's obviously playing right to my interests with mountaintop lairs, submarine cars, physics-defying stunts, gadgets, and impeccably tailored suits.

Taron Edgerton, Mark Strong, Edward Holcroft (now sporting a Bionic Barry arm), and even Colin Firth (with a nod to Nick Fury) all return from the original Kingsman, joined this time by Michael Gambon, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry, and Julianne Moore. In a recent schedule change reported by Deadline, Kingsman: The Golden Circle now opens September 22, a week sooner than the previously announced September 29. Doug Liman's Tom Cruise spy movie American Made will open on that date, with Universal executives hoping a week is enough time to get out of the sure to be massive box office orbit of the Kingsman sequel.

Teaser for the Trailer for KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

I'm not really a fan of the new trend of teasers for trailers, but I do admire the fact that the Kingsman: The Golden Circle team have discovered a new approach. Rather than just showing a few seconds of action from the trailer, they've released a super high speed version of the complete trailer. So let your eyes imprint on brief snatches of what we can expect from the full version of the first trailer for the eagerly anticipated sequel when it drops in the coming days, or else go meticulously frame-by-frame through it to get glimpses of everything. Be warned, of course, that if there's such a thing as a spoiler for a trailer, this effectively manages to "spoil" the entire thing. Taron Edgerton, Mark Strong, and even Colin Firth all return from the original Kingsman, joined this time by Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry, and Julianne Moore. Matthew Vaughn once again directs.  Kingsman: The Golden Circle opens September 29 opposite Doug Liman's Tom Cruise spy movie American Made. (Let's hope we get a trailer for that one soon, too!)

First Poster for KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

I was not a fan of the first Kingsman movie, but that doesn't mean I'm not excited for the sequel. I still like the premise, and I hope that this time Matthew Vaughn delivers on it with a little more fun and a little less gratuitous and offputting graphic violence. In Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Eggsy (Taron Edgerton) and Merlin (Mark Strong) encounter their American counterparts at the secret U.S. spy agency Statesman. Cue that favorite English stereotype of all Americans as cowboys. While the British stereotype (from the first film, but really borrowed from The Avengers) remains well-tailored suits and brollies, the American one is apparently jeans and whips. I would hazard that a larger percentage of Englishmen actually do carry umbrellas than Americans whips. I've lived in three very different geographical parts of the United States and never seen anyone with a whip in public outside of Indiana Jones cosplayers at Comic-Con.... Makes for great teaser poster iconography though!