Matthew Vaughn is already working on the second movie of a secret Kick-Ass reboot trilogy

Matthew Vaughn recently directed the meta-twisty action-comedy Argylle, but it seems like he might still be trapped in that film’s world of fake authors and fake novels, because his next project sounds just as needlessly complicated as that one was. Apparently, Vaughn is knee-deep in a new trilogy based on Kick-Ass—the cartoonishly violent superhero comedy he made in 2010 with Aaron Taylor-Johnson that was based on the Mark Miller and John Romita Jr. comic of the same name—that will serve as a reboot of the series (a less well-received sequel came out in 2013). There’s nothing weird about that on its own, especially since Vaughn teased it back in 2021, but what’s weird is that the first movie in this reboot trilogy was already filmed in secret and now Vaughn is getting to work on a second one (as a producer).

Former stunt performer Damien Walters (who is a real guy, so at least Argylle hasn’t sunk that deep into Vaughn’s brain) is directing at least these first two movies, which are called School Fight and The Stuntman. Variety says the first one is about “a teenager who gets into a fight with a love rival at school” and was secretly finished “a couple of years ago,” and the next one is called The Stuntman and focuses on two brothers who become stuntmen.

Neither of these things necessarily sound like Kick-Ass movies, so there are definitely some shenanigans in play here. Vaughn also detailed a bit of this in a chat with Collider last month where he said that the third film will be the new Kick-Ass, and while that doesn’t really explain anything, it does add to the evidence of shenanigans. We would wager that there’s still something going on here (perhaps these aren’t all full feature films?), because it seems like it would be tough to sell three new superhero movies, sight unseen, to a studio and to the public on nothing but the promise that the last one will tie everything together to a familiar IP.

Unless… is there a chance Kick-Ass is the real Agent Argylle and we’re still in Argylle? Maybe we never left Argylle, and Bryce Dallas Howard is writing about all of this in a book, and we’re all characters in an Argylle book about Matthew Vaughn making secret Kick-Ass movies?