Comic-Con kicks off its big movie news in Hall H with Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and we’re live-blogging it.
20th Century Fox is the first major movie studio presentation for San Diego Comic-Con 2017, opening up Hall H on Thursday morning. While fans initially theorized about the presence of Deadpool 2 and Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the slot in the official SDCC schedule was recently updated from simply 20th Century Fox to taking on a more specific single-movie focus – Kingsman: The Golden Circle.
Stars Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges and Pedro Pascal (some of whom were spotted last night checking out the Kingsman activation at the Hard Rock Hotel) are expected to appear along with Kingsman comics co-creator Dave Gibbons and screenwriter Jane Goldman. The panel’s moderator will be Goldman’s husband, U.K. television personality and SDCC staple Jonathan Ross.
The highly anticipated sequel to 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service was originally slated for a June release, but was bumped to September — which means have to wait two more months to find out how Harry Hart survived, but also means we get one more Comic-Con panel from the dapper team. A brand new red band trailer dropped this morning — watch it once more while we’re waiting for the panel to begin, and then follow along with our live reactions below. Refresh the page for updates from 11 a.m. PDT!
Note: This event has now ended, but you can read our live blog coverage below.
10:45 AM Just got seated in Hall H, and it’s about half full. Everyone gets a free gift — a tee replicating Eggsy’s new orange tuxedo jacket, and a fidget spinner.
11:02 AM No movement yet… officially two minutes late! It’s gonna be worth the wait though. No, scratch that, they’re announcing over the PA that it’s about to start!
11:10 AM Okay, SDCC Director of Programming Eddie Ibrahim introduced the panel with a special animated intro, which featured a suited Eggsy free-running across London rooftops and finding the Kingsman tailor shop invaded by none other than STERLING ARCHER. Fun crossover — and given that this is Eggsy’s first impression of American spies, he clearly needs to go over there and teach them a lesson!
11:15 AM Moderator Jonathan Ross is onstage introducing the panel, asking us to put on the orange shirts for some sort of stunt at the end.
11:26 AM Just got a long look at the movie’s opening, introduced in a video from Matthew Vaughn, who isn’t present (but is also wearing the orange jacket.) Eggsy is attacked in front of the shop by failed Kingsman recruit Charlie, who now has a metal robotic arm and a gadget-filled fight and car chase through London occurs. More in detail on that after the panel.
In more detail: Eggsy exits the tailor shop (the orange jacket is in the window, a slow zoom on it) and is confronted by Charlie Hesketh (Edward Holcroft), who you may remember was the upper-class Kingsman trainee that Eggsy and Roxy beat out in Kingsman: The Secret Service. Charlie now looks like a skinhead in a hoodie and forces Eggsy into a taxi at gunpoint. The car is a disguised Kingsman vehicle and the pair fight inside the car, a scene featuring lots of tilting angles and utilizing many of the gadgets contained in the car and on Eggsy’s person. It’s revealed that Charlie has a metal robotic hand, which he’s able to drag along the road and slow down the car, and in the fray, Eggsy accidentally kills his own driver with the poison shoe tip knife.
Several other cars — presumably on Charlie’s side — chase and ram the taxi, and the regular police pursue him as well. At one point, Charlie kicks Eggsy all the way out of the car, but he manages to get back in. Charlie also loses his robotic hand — it’s a full arm, yanked out of his sleeve. Eggsy, communicating with Merlin at Kingsman’s country house base, diverts to a rendezvous point in Hyde Park, driving under the water (windshield is smashed and gone at this point) into the Serpentine, where the car turns into an underwater vessel and he’s able to access an underwater tunnel. Final shot is the water draining out of the chamber and Eggsy catching his breath.
11:29 AM Cast and creators are introduced — in order: Dave Gibbons, Jane Goldman, Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, Jeff Bridges.
11:31 AM Comics creator Dave Gibbons will do his first ever drawing of Taron Egerton as Eggsy (his Eggsy looks different in the comics) and will give it away today!
11:32 AM This is longtime partners Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn’s first ever sequel to one of their projects, which was challenging. The front for the American Statesmen — the Southern gentlemen equivalent of Kingsmen — is the alcohol business. Bourbon!
11:34 AM Ross says Taron Egerton has bulked up since the first movie — talking in reference to the breathing process necessary for the underwater scenes we saw in the opening. Taron says he’s nothing compared to Channing Tatum. “Do not get into a fight with Channing Tatum.” Channing says Taron is very talented… but maybe not so much in the strength department.
11:35 AM Firth on Harry’s survival: “Well, I’m in the trailer. I seem to do a lot of shaving. That’s all I can really say.”
11:36 AM Halle Berry’s character Ginger does for the Statesmen what Merlin does for the Kingsman.
11:38 AM Pascal’s character is the props guy, including a lot of work with lassos and whips. They defer to Bridges about pronunciation — “I call it a rope!”
11:39 AM Jeff Bridges character Champagne is the boss Statesmen, seems to be an ex-addict who likes to get up close with his vices and not succumb.
11:43 AM Just saw another clip, introduced by Taron. “Remember how I said earlier, don’t get in a fight with Channing Tatum?” Clip features Merlin and Eggsy arriving at Statesmen distillery, hacking into their buildings, and getting caught by Channing’s character Tequila — the first meeting between them. Two against one and he beats them both, including stunning Eggsy with his own watch.
In more detail: Eggsy and Merlin, visiting the Statesman distillery in Kentucky, break into one of the storage barns by hacking through their extremely high tech biometric scan locks — a factor that makes them suspicious. It’s clear that they don’t know this is Statesman HQ — but that it’s something suspicious. Their tech scans allow them to discover that there is a hidden bunker beneath them, and Merlin analyses that the entrance must be disguised as one of the huge whisky casks. He comes at it with an ax, and it turns out to just be whisky — and that’s when Tequila, Channing Tatum’s character arrives.
His opening line is similar to the one that was on his first character poster — something along the lines of “My momma always told me that us Southerners got our good manners from the English” and interrogates them about who they are — Merlin and Eggsy keep up the pretense of Kingsman tailors, which Tatum doesn’t buy, and goes from slow, kind cowboy to sharp as a tack in a millisecond, never losing his chill initial vibe. He pulls a large rifle on them, you know, in a friendly way, and the confrontation turns into a fight, where Tequila fends off both Merlin and Eggsy, tossing them around the distillery and eventually taking Eggsy down by forcing him to stab himself with the stun function in his own watch — Tequila was able to operate it and scan through its settings easily. It’s clear that he knows more about the Kingsmen than the Kingsmen know about the Statesmen.
11:45 AM The cast is now all sampling the Statesmen whisky and facetiming Matthew Vaughn!
11:48 AM Audience questions — the cast is now asking if they can do drink forfeits when they don’t want to answer a question — a la Halle Berry, who was asked which franchise was more quintessentially British, this one or James Bond (which she was also in.) She chugged it.
11:50 AM Someone asked the run time — Two hours 15 mins without the credits.
11:51 AM Asking Tatum what his most memorable scene in the movie was — “Nice try.”
11:52 AM Taron says prep for the two movies was similar, hours and hours and hours and hours of choreography particularly.
11:52 AM Firth is charmingly trying to figure out what he can even say — but that he did have to prep some different things for this movie. The first one was very hard for him because he has “no athletic ability whatsover.”
11:54 AM Re: making a villain comparable to Sam Jackson’s Valentine, Goldman says that she and Vaughn always want to write villains you debate about afterwards — ones where maybe what they wanted wasn’t that bad, but they went about it the wrong way.
11:56 AM What does it take to be a true Kingsman or Statesman? Firth: umbrella work and good emotional management. Tatum: gotta be able to drink and fight. Bridges: A nice pair of boots.
11:59 AM Making the hall do a group selfie in the orange tee shirts, and they’ve brought Taron his real orange jacket for it.
12:00 PM About to see clip of the big villian, Poppy, played by Julianne Moore.
12:07 PM Poppy is leader of the Golden Circle, the world’s biggest/best drug cartel. Her HQ is an undiscovered rainforest mountain ruin which she’s had decorated in 1950s Americana style. One of her henchmen brings a new recruit to meet her, and she makes new guy prove his loyalty by putting the current agent in a meat grinder and then eat a burger made from the meat. She also has robotic guard dogs — similar tech to Charlie’s arm, seen in first clip.
In more detail: The clip opens on the rainforest mountain — possibly South America — as Poppy voices over a bit about herself, and how she didn’t intend to end up running this drug cartel, but it’s all turned out this way — she’s talking to the two men meeting with her in the diner. Poppy is perfectly presented in a red dress, and speaks very sweetly to the henchmen visiting her in her diner (other stores set up in her ruin include a donut shop, a salon, an old gas station, possibly a drive-in cinema) — making it all rather terrifying to discover how hardcore she actually is.
There’s a definite Stepford Wives vibe for the world she’s created for herself — she’s built everything she wants, and they all serve her — even her dogs don’t have minds of their own. The robotic creations, including the salon attendee who gives Angel — the new henchman who feeds his old friend into the meet grinder — a makeover (removing teeth and fingerprints, and tattoos him with molton gold) are very clearly the same tech as the arm we saw on Charlie in the opening scene, so he must work for Poppy as well. Poppy is clearly extremely ruthless, and demands proof of obedience — but why she wields this power, what her reputation is in the wider world, is as yet unclear.
12:11 PM And that’s it! Attendees are encouraged to visit happy hour at the Kingsman bar over at Hard Rock Hotel, where they’ll be serving Statesmen whisky and… Poppy Burgers.
We’ll edit this post to include more extensive information once the panel has concluded. Edit: additional information about the footage shown has been added to the above, in italics.