Chloe Moretz first came onto our radar playing the creepily sexualized, foul-mouthed, satirical superhero Hit Girl in Kick-Ass. She did it again without the satire (or the box office success) in Kick-Ass 2, and now she says the only reason that she won’t be back for a third installment is… those damned dirty pirates. Hey, kid! Stop all the downloadin!
Speaking to Digital Spy, the actress said that she doesn’t believe Kick-Ass 3 will happen and suggested that piracy resulted in the underwhelming box office performance of last year’s sequel.
“Sadly, I think I’m done with the character,” Moretz said. “Hit-Girl was a very cool character, but I don’t think there will be any more movies. You make these movies for the fanboys, but nowadays everyone seems to pirate them rather than watch them in the movie theatre.
“Kick-Ass 2 was one of the number one pirated movies of the year, but that doesn’t help us because we need box office figures. We need to prove to the distributors that we can make money from a third and a fourth movie – but because it didn’t do so well, we can’t make another one.
“If you want more than one movie, everyone has to go and see movies at the cinema. It’s all about the numbers in the theatre.”
I don’t want to pooh-pooh piracy concerns too much, because as tempting as it is, I look at the current state of music and I can’t say it’s not a valid worry. That said, the movies that end up complaining the loudest about piracy – Kick-Ass 2, The Expendables 3 – always seem like the very epitome of movies that aren’t good enough for people to want to go see at the theater. There’s an elasticity of demand there, where people might watch it if the barrier is pretty low, but not if it means getting off their ass and going to the theater. Also, if you were trying to convince people of all the bad piracy has wrought, it scuttling a third Kick-Ass movie wouldn’t be the first bullet on anyone’s power point. Which isn’t to say that stealing movies isn’t wrong. I don’t know what the solution is. All I know is that if “Poo Poo Pirates” isn’t in production by the time I finish writing this, the internet isn’t as powerful as I think it is.