Newcomer Aaron Johnson has a lot of reasons to smile. His superhero film Kick-Ass was the number one movie at the box office last weekend, and off screen he's engaged to be married to his seven-months-pregnant fianc�e, British artist Sam Taylor-Wood.
Life could not be any better � if only his relationship with his onetime director wasn't raising so many eyebrows.
At 43, Taylor-Wood is 24 years older than Johnson and already a mother of two from an 11-year marriage to art dealer Jay Jopling. Despite the age difference and existing family, Johnson is madly in love. "I've got a wonderful woman," says the 19-year-old. "She's lovely and she's a fantastic mother."
The two met in 2009 on the set of her directorial debut, Nowhere Boy. In it Johnson played a young John Lennon and the two immediately hit it off. Engaged months after meeting and already living together, Johnson brushes off critics about their whirlwind romance saying, "I'm an old soul and she's a young soul."
As the couple prepare for the arrival of their baby this summer, Johnson says he's "excited" and insists that he is undaunted by the challenges of fatherhood. "It's not scary," he says. "I'm already a stepdad to [Taylor-Wood's kids Angelica, 13, and Jessie, 3] anyway. So the nerves have sort of gone."
Despite the lack of an A-list star in the title role or a long-established fanbase, "Kick-Ass" seemed set to hit the #1 box-office spot over the weekend and launch the start of a new comic book movie franchise. But instead of fulfilling projections that fell in the $25-30 million range, "Kick-Ass" didn't quite cross the $20 million plateau by Sunday night, and now the green light for a sequel seems far from certain.
That's quite a turnaround from weeks and months past, when "Kick-Ass" director Matthew Vaughn and stars Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz talked of their plans for a sequel.
"We have an idea for the sequel. We have a lot of options," Vaughn told MTV News at South by Southwest in March, declining to elaborate, since the film hadn't yet come out.
Perhaps that was a wise decision on his part. While Mark Millar, who wrote the "Kick-Ass" comic, has plans to pen a sequel, it's unclear whether that comic will form the basis for a second film.
Johnson, who plays the title character, was looking forward to seeing what Millar has planned and how it might have figured into a sequel film.
"His mind is out there and elaborate, and he's got some fantastic ideas and he's got a huge fanbase," the actor said. "So, it'd be exciting to see what the second comic's going to say, because he's going to bring it out probably summertime next year."
Johnson was pulling for a sequel in which his character, a mild-mannered teen who decides to become a green-suited crime fighter, develops some abilities more in line with his alter ego's name, Kick-Ass. "It'd be great if I could learn how to fight," he said. "If he doesn't, he doesn't. I don't think the character should develop into some superhero. He's forever Dave Lizewski, this kid that's got a lot of heart and he's really sensitive. I don't think you can f--- around with the character so much."
Moretz, meanwhile, had hopes that her Hit-Girl superhero would start riding a purple Ducati outfitted with Gatling guns.
What are the chances that will happen after the first film's middling box office bow? It's not unheard of for a movie that doesn't rake in huge dollars to gain a sequel. Arriving on U.S. soil in 1980, "Mad Max" grossed just $8.6 million, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com, but it launched Mel Gibson's career and led to two more films � the second grossing $36.2 million in 1985. A year earlier, "The Terminator" pulled in just over $4 million � good for the #1 spot but hardly huge numbers at that time � yet it went on to become a franchise. More recent examples like "Final Destination," "Resident Evil" and "The Transporter" show that a first film doesn't have to do gangbuster numbers to spawn further installments.
So what's the fate of "Kick-Ass"? We'll have to wait to see how the movie performs in the coming weeks to have a better idea of its cinematic future. Only then will we know the answer to co-star Mark Strong's stance: "I'm sure it can go on and on if they want it to."
