20th Century Fox(LOS ANGELES) — Director Matthew Vaughn launched his Kingsman movies to bring the fun back to the spy genre, but things get deadly serious in the new trailer to the series’ prequel, The King’s Man.
In the original movie Kingsman: The Secret Service, Colin Firth’s Harry Hart tells Taron Egerton’s Eggsy about the history of the international spy agency, which started in a tailor shop. Since 1849, the shop’s tailors had dressed some of the world’s most powerful people, but World War I left many of them of those powerful people without heirs. And so instead, Harry explains, they pooled their fortunes to create an international agency to “preserve peace and protect life.”
The King’s Man dives with both feet into that backstory, and into the mud and blood of the First World War. The preview begins with a kilted soldier running across a battlefield in slow motion, carrying an injured comrade on his back.
“Real power is not running off to war,” Ralph Fiennes’ Duke of Oxford tells a protege, played by Harris Dickinson. “I know you want to fight. But there are other ways of doing your duty” — before revealing the storefront of the Kingsman shop/HQ.
The film will feature the Kingsmen tangling with a collection of “history’s worst tyrants and madmen,” who are trying to bring about the end of the world.
“It’s a great big, big epic adventure,” Vaughn tells ABC Radio, adding that it’s based on the classic The Man Who Would Be King, starring Sean Connery and original Kingsman star Michael Caine.
“A lot of filmmakers borrow from it,” Vaughn says, adding with a laugh: “I’ve just joined the list.” (AUDIO IS ABC 1-ON-1)
The King’s Man comes out Feb. 14, 2020.
A modern-set Kingsman sequel with Firth and Egerton is also in the works.
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