Whilst it maŷ have been divisive to the point where it verged on controversy, there’s no denying that last year’s ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ was a massive success. The movie was roundly criticised for having a pretty neanderthalic representation of gender, and a final act that left a significant portion of critics and audiences alike cold, but having returned $414m worldwide and cost less than a quarter of that to make, there was no doubt whatsoever that we’d be seeing a sequel.
The sequel will retain a lot of the elements of the first movie. It’s working title is ‘Kingsman: The Golden Circle’, and it’s been slated for a June 2017 release, with principle photography due to commence this month. Director Matthew Vaughan is returning, as are most of the original cast, with Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Ed Holcroft and Sophie Cookson all back as members of the UK’s most hidden secret service.
Replacing Sam Jackson on bad-guy duties this time round is the relatively surprising selection of Julianne Moore, who will be playing a sinister villain named Poppy. Concept art for the project that Vaughan has released online shows the utter destruction of the Kingsman headquarters by Poppy, forcing the beleaguered agency to team up with their US counterparts, who are called ‘Statesman’.
The same concept art shows the Statesman headquarters to be concealed in an eponymous bourbon distillery. This agency is headed up by Halle Berry’s character, who is called Ginger, and it’s been announced this week that her right hand man, aptly named Jack Daniels, will be played by GoT fan favourite Pedro Pascal.
With Egerton having steadily raised his profile in both ‘Legend’ and ‘Eddie the Eagle’, alongside the presence of A-Listers Berry and Moore, this sequel already looks in pretty good shape. But in addition to this, the initial advertising for the movie has also teased the return of Colin Firth’s character, Harry Hart.
Now, the story so far would make it nigh on impossible for that to happen, so it’s not clear if this will be a flashback or some kind of ghostly Obi-Wan apportion, but given how the first film descended into comic anarchy to the point of farce in its last half hour, it’d be no real surprise to see him back in the flesh now, would it?
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