The Kingsman franchise is one of the most fascinating movie series around, a throwback to ’60s Bond films with a modern sensibility and over-the-top violence. Kingsman movies are successful and popular but have never been breakout blockbusters on par with other similar franchises. It very much seems like the type of franchise from another era but paradoxically feels very of the moment.
Based on the comic book of the same name from writer Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and artist Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), the film series follows the Kingsman organization, a fictional British Secret Service that specializes in spy espionage using code names drawn from Arthurian legend, and known for their signature Kingsman style suits and accessories that also happen to be weapons. The franchise has spawned three films, all directed by Matthew Vaughn, and the plan currently includes another Kingsman film that will serve as a proper trilogy conclusion to the first two films, titled Kingsman: The Blue Blood. There are also plans for a television spin-off focused on the American branch of the organization, The Statesman.
Update January 12th, 2022: This article has been updated with new information for Kingsman 3 regarding its delayed filming and possible release date.
The film series is a passion project for director Matthew Vaughn, as he passed on directing X-Men: Days of Future Past in order to helm the first film, and the franchise has defined his filmography for the past seven years. Kingsman 3 was set to begin filming in 2022 but no word has been made on production since and no release date is set, although Disney has a February 9, 2024 release date saved for an untitled 20th Century Fox picture that the third Kingsman film could easily fit.
The franchise has had its up and downs since the first movie in 2015, the series is unique among other spy films like James Bond or Jason Bourne, and big-budget comic book adaptations like those in the MCU and the DCEU. These are the Kingsman movies, ranked from the weakest to the best.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
3 Kingsman: The Golden Circle
20th Century Fox
Released in 2017, Kingsman: The Golden Circle picks up a year after the first film. It follows members of Kingsman needing to team up with their American counterpart, Statesman after the world is held hostage by Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore) and her drug cartel, “The Golden Circle.” Eggsy (Taron Egerton) also discovers his mentor Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is alive.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
The film continues the high-stakes action from the previous installment, as Vaughn certainly knows how to craft a visual spectacle with some great action sequences. It has some interesting conversations about how the world treats people who partake in recreational drugs or people with addiction, but because of the film’s lack of subtlety and tone tends to muddy that message.
The biggest issues Kingsman: The Golden Circle suffers from are a lot of the same flaws that plagued Men in Black 2, another follow-up to a successful film that introduced a secret organization. Much like Men in Black 2 does with Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), Kingsman: The Golden Circle brings back Harry Hart despite the character’s death being a major impact on Eggsy’s character development moving forward. The movie also suffers from the classic sequel problem of doing the first film’s breakout gags but again and bigger, repeating the bar fight but this time with Harry messing up, and choosing to double down on the controversial sex scene in a much worse way.
2 The King’s Man
Originally set to open in 2019 but delayed repeatedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The King’s Man was finally released in theaters in December 2021 and actually sort of sets the franchise back on track by returning to the origin of the Kingsman organization. The movie expands on the expositional dialogue explaining the Kingsman organization in the first film and is set during World War 1.
The King’s Man shows the origins and fallout of the war through the eyes of aristocrat Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), a man of peace who begins the Kingsman organization to stop the war and the mysterious evil organization, The Flock, consisting of various historical figures like Gavrilo Princip, Erik Jan Hanussen, Mata Hari, and Grigori Rasputin, all of whom are part of an elaborate conspiracy to push the world to war.
Similar to his work on X-Men: First Class, The King’s Man shows Vaughn’s passion for mixing real-life historical events and exaggerating them with a comic book sensibility, even with an after-credit ending scene that plays out like a history teacher trying to pepper in some comic-book lessons into their class. The movie has a real sense of energy with the massive set pieces audiences come to expect from the Kingsman franchise, but the director does broaden the visual language with a grounded trench sequence and emotional meditation on the loss of life in war. Transplanting a spy film, which has its roots in the 1960s, and setting it at the turn of the 20th century provides a unique perspective on both the time period and the genre that makes it feel fresh.
1 Kingsman: The Secret Service
Kingsman: The Secret Service is the film that launched the franchise and is arguably the best one. Even seven years after its release, the movie still feels fresh and exciting and introduces a whole world of possibilities that the follow-up films have only delivered a fraction of.
The first Kingsman tells the story of Eggsy and his recruitment and training into the spy organization, The Kingsman. Meanwhile, a global threat from Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), a wealthy megalomaniac wanting to deal with climate change by wiping out most humanity, begins to loom large, and Eggsy must work with the Kingsman to stop the threat and save the world as an international super spy. The movie’s pitch is incredible, a mix of British boarding school stories (think Harry Potter) but for super spies like a YA novel, but mixed in with a great deal of cartoonish violence and massive stakes rooted in classic super-villain schemes of comics and serials, all of which felt both familiar but also incredibly unique.
Kingsman: The Secret Service has incredible action and was a great throwback to the best James Bond movies from its earlier days, something that much of 21st-century spy fiction had tried to distance itself from. The movie set the template for the franchise as being an action series with a political theme as its central conflict, this time being about class consciousness and privilege, a concept that has only become more topical among audiences since the film’s release. While the follow-ups have failed to match the original, it is not hard to see why this first film spawned a franchise that, at this point, could go on for years.
