Published
The answer is no, and unusually it is a clear no
Most entries in this tracker are ambiguous by nature, announced and then silent, wanted and never commissioned. This one is not. In February 2024 Matthew Vaughn stated that a third film following Kick-Ass 2 was not the plan, and that the property would instead be restarted as a new trilogy.
That makes it one of the few entries here marked dead rather than stalled. The distinction this tracker draws is between projects that went quiet and projects that were answered, and being replaced by a reboot is an answer.
What is being made instead
The reboot is further along than the phrase “in development” usually implies:
- School Fight, the first film, already shot, with no announced release date
- The Stuntman, a second entry under a working title Vaughn has indicated will probably change
- Kick-Ass — a third film, currently being written, taking the plain franchise name
Vaughn is a co-producer rather than the director, which mirrors his role on the 2013 sequel. The plan being a trilogy from the outset is the notable part: this is not a cautious single reboot testing the water but a slate.
Why a direct third film was never really available
The obstacle was arithmetic. Kick-Ass arrived in 2010 built around two very young leads — a teenage boy playing at being a superhero and an eleven-year-old assassin. That premise is tied to their ages in a way most action franchises are not. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloë Grace Moretz were both going to age out of it, and by the mid-2020s both had substantial careers elsewhere.
A direct sequel therefore faced recasting the two roles the audience came for, which is functionally a reboot with a sequel’s title. Choosing the reboot openly is the more honest version of the same decision, and it frees the new films from having to account for the events of the 2013 sequel.
What this means for the comic-derived tail
Worth noting for anyone tracking the franchise rather than the single film: the source comics concluded, so a third film would also have been working past its material rather than adapting it. Between exhausted source material and leads who could no longer play the parts, “Kick-Ass 3” as most people imagined it (the same actors, the next chapter) stopped being possible some years before it was formally set aside.
The reboot may well be good. It is simply not the film this entry is about, and conflating the two is how a dead project ends up looking alive in search results.