It’s been announced today that Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, based on the Marvel/Icon comic mini-series from Mark Milllar and John Romita Jr., has been slated to kick off the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas, having been chosen as the Opening Night film playing on March 12. (The film portion of the festival runs through March 21.) The movie recently played as part of the annual Butt-Numb-A-Thon Festival to raves from everyone in attendance.
Kick-Ass is the story of average teen Dave (Aaron Johnson), a comic-book fanboy who decides to take his obsession as inspiration to become a real-life superhero.
His life is forever changed as he inspires a subculture of copy cats, is hunted by assorted violent and unpleasant characters, and meets up with a pair of crazed vigilantes, including Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), and another fledgling superhero, Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). But thanks to the scheming of a local mob boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), that new alliance will be put to the test.
SXSW also announced the first five movies playing the festival: Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather, Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx starring Carla Gugino, and the documentaries Hubble 3D, Lemmy about the frontman from Motörhead, and actor James Franco’s documentary Saturday Night about what goes into putting on an episode of NBC’s long-running sketch comedy show “Saturday Night Live.”
Kick-Ass opens theatrically on April 16, but look for a few interviews we did at last year’s Comic-Con sometime next week over on SuperHeroHype.
