15 Years Ago, Another R-Rated Superhero Movie Paved The Way For Deadpool At The Box Office

(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)

"This is going to be the most expensive home movie I ever made." Those are the alleged words of director Matthew Vaughn, according to Christopher Mintz-Plasse, one of the stars of 2010's "Kick-Ass." In an interview with Chron at the time, the "Superbad" star explained that Vaughn's R-rated superhero movie "almost didn't get made" and that "nobody wanted to touch it." 

That all may be hard to imagine now. Why wouldn't a studio want to back a comic book movie with a killer cast? And this is Matthew Vaughn we're talking about! But 2010 was a very different time. Vaughn hadn't yet reinvented the "X-Men" franchise with "First Class," nor had he delivered the "Kingsman" property. He was merely a stylish filmmaker with movies like "Layer Cake" and "Stardust" under his belt. More importantly, the industry at large hadn't yet embraced the notion of R-rated comic book movies, despite the success the superhero genre was experiencing.

All the same, Vaughn felt strongly enough about Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s indie comic book to risk it all for "Kick-Ass." In the process, he helped tee up the ball for much, much bigger hits like "Deadpool" and "Logan" in the years that followed.

In this week's Tales from the Box office, we're looking back at "Kick-Ass" in honor of its 15th anniversary. We'll go over how the movie came to be, why Vaughn had to try to cobble together the budget himself, the controversy that erupted around the film ahead of its release, what happened when it hit theaters, what went down in the aftermath of its release, and what we can learn from it all these years later. Let's dig in, shall we?

The first "Kick-Ass" movie centers on comic book geek Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an ordinary teenager who turns himself into a masked vigilante named Kick-Ass. With an utter lack of powers, his first foray into heroism goes awry. However, he soon becomes an internet phenomenon, capturing the attention of crime-fighting duo Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), who have been taking down the criminal empire of Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). Before he knows it, Dave is unwittingly drawn into a much larger conflict than he bargained for.

"Matthew and I were friends anyway and we'd been talking about doing something [together] and he just asked me, 'What do you have?' and I responded by saying there were a couple of books I was working on I thought might interest him," Millar explained to MovieFreak.com in 2010. "He read both of them, and afterwards he said, 'I'd like to do 'Kick-Ass,” and from that point on we were pretty much a go."

Rumors first swirled in early 2008 that Vaughn was circling "Kick-Ass." The problem? No studio wanted to back the project. So, Vaughn raised the $30 million budget himself (per The Hollywood Reporter). He cobbled together the money from various sources, including none other than Brad Pitt, who is credited as a producer. It's not that Vaughn intended to go the independent route, but Sony (which Vaughn approached about the film early on) wanted him to tone down the violence, while others wanted him to age the main characters up. In the end, Vaughn had a vision in mind and stuck to it, difficult as it may have been.

It's worth remembering what the landscape of superhero cinema looked like 15 years ago. This was just two years after "Iron Man" kickstarted the Marvel Cinematic Universe and only 10 years after "X-Men" helped open the door for mainstream Marvel movies as we know them. The floodgates were open, but there were still perceived limitations.

Sure, R-rated superhero movies had been done before. Just look at 1998's "Blade" and its game-changing success. But these instances were far from the norm and Hollywood at large still wanted to keep these films PG-13 if possible. Plus, "Kick-Ass" was ultra-violent, with much of that violence being carried out by an 11-year-old girl played by Moretz. There were understandable concerns.

In any event, Vaughn managed to assemble quite the cast. Taylor-Johnson was a promising up-and-comer at the time who would later become an A-list thanks to his roles in blockbusters like "Godzilla" and "Avengers: Age of Ultron." Meanwhile, Cage was firmly in his direct-to-home-media period, but ended up delivering a standout performance all the same. Cage also channeled the least-R-rated superhero imaginable while playing Big Daddy – namely, Adam West's Batman. As the Oscar-winner put it:

"I would give it all to Adam West. I grew up watching him on the '60s Batman show and he is where it begins and where it ends as Big Daddy. I met Adam West once and I said 'Did you see I was channeling you?' and he said 'I saw you TRY to channel me!'"

In the year 2025, R-rated comic book superhero shenanigans simply aren't that shocking. We're less than six years removed from "Joker" becoming a $1 billion, Oscar-winning smash hit and not even a year out from "Deadpool & Wolverine" becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever. However, ahead of the release of "Kick-Ass," people were flat out up in arms over its content. A lot of this centered on Hit-Girl, with Moretz using horrible language and murdering people left and right as a pre-teen. This was a bridge too far for certain onlookers.

"It's a movie; it's not me. If I ever uttered one word that I said in ['Kick-Ass'], I would be grounded for years! I'd be stuck in my room until I was 20! I would never in a million years say that," Moretz countered in an interview with MTV at the time. Even so, several high-profile critics were also openly against the film, including the late, great Roger Ebert, who gave it a scathing one-star review. Ebert was not shy about his feelings, writing:

"Will I seem hopelessly square if I find 'Kick-Ass' morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let's say you're a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in."

Despite all of that, pre-release buzz for the film was building, with Lionsgate having won the distribution rights to "Kick-Ass" in August 2009 in a competitive bidding war. Universal and Paramount were also in the mix, but Lionsgate won the day; controversy be damned, the studio was happy to take this risky movie on as a business proposition.

After some footage was shown at San Diego Comic-Con more than a year before its release, the buzz for "Kick-Ass" was very high in fan circles. When it came time for the actual theatrical rollout, critics were a bit more mixed but landed on the positive side of things (as evidenced by the film's 78% on Rotten Tomatoes). Still, curiosity got the best of moviegoers in the end.

"Kick-Ass" hit theaters on April 16, 2010. It was a pretty crowded frame, with "How to Train Your Dragon" on its fourth weekend, "Date Night" on its second, and "Death at a Funeral" having only just debuted. Plus, Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" was still in the middle of its $1 billion run. Even so, in a very tight race, Vaughn's stylish superhero affair narrowly topped the charts domestically with $19.8 million, barely edging out "How to Train Your Dragon" ($19.6 million).

While the movie didn't hold particularly well, Lionsgate got to claim it had the number one movie in the U.S., and Vaughn got to breathe a sigh of relief. The investment paid off. Maybe not handsomely, but well enough. Millar even addressed the box office numbers for "Kick-Ass" after its opening weekend:

"We're looking at a very nice profit here and word of mouth is spectacular — the reviews being among the best I've ever seen — and so we're all very proud to find ourselves in this position. Positive advance reviews had some people hoping for a $25 million domestic opening. I wanted 'Avatar' numbers myself, but as Matthew sensibly pointed out, we were made on a Tarantino budget and should be more than happy with Tarantino numbers."

"Kick-Ass" finished its run with $48 million domestically to go with $49.4 million overseas for a grand total of $97.5 million worldwide. It wasn't a barn burner, but the movie did just well enough to prove that R-rated superheroes were worth exploring.

In 2010, "Kick-Ass" was only the 69th biggest movie worldwide. It didn't even crack $100 million. At the same time, it managed to turn a profit against its very reasonable $30 million budget. While piracy may have been an issue for both this movie and its 2013 sequel "Kick-Ass 2," there was no denying that this film was a success, even if it was a relatively modest one by superhero blockbuster standards.

In the years that followed, other, bigger comic book movies boldly stood out on that R-rated ledge. Most notably, 2016's "Deadpool," which became a $782 million smash hit. The following year, "Logan" made $619 million and earned an Oscar nod for Best Adapted Screenplay. Then came "Joker" in 2019. All of these movies had the benefit of playing in the Marvel or DC sandboxes. But "Deadpool," in particular, undoubtedly got to point at "Kick-Ass" and say "It can be done." Whether or not the movie gets any credit for that is another question entirely.

But let's not undercut the success of "Kick-Ass" and how impactful it was. It's a major part of what led Netflix to straight-up buy Millar's Millarworld in 2017. That deal hasn't exactly panned out, but it wouldn't have even happened if this movie hadn't been a hit. It speaks volumes about just how well "Kick-Ass" did, even if it didn't live up to unfairly placed sky-high pre-release expectations.

Eventually, "Kick-Ass 2" made just $63 million against tepid reviews and sort of killed the franchise in its tracks for a good, long while. Millar has talked an awful lot about a "Kick-Ass" reboot over the years, though nothing has materialized. For the moment, this remains more of a one-off success story that helped to tee up the ball for much bigger things down the road. Indeed, the first one through the wall is rarely the biggest one that will come through.

In the modern era of superheroes being the biggest of big business, Vaughn and Millar tried to break down a new door. That opened the door for some of the better superhero movies ever made to exist. More than that, they widened the scope of what these movies could be. At a time when more and more superhero films are struggling both creatively and commercially, often because they feel a little same-y or risk-averse, "Kick-Ass" continues to stand out. Love it or hate it, that's tough to deny.

It's easy to understand why Marvel Studios or DC Studios won't gamble so hastily with $200 million blockbusters. That said, at a time when audiences seem to want something different, why not do smaller-budget comic book movies outside the norm? DC is now doing an R-rated "Clayface" horror film, which certainly feels like a step in the right direction. Modern superhero filmmaking could stand to learn a thing or two from "Kick-Ass."