[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for The King’s Man.]
Matthew Vaughn’s 2014 blockbuster Kingsman: The Secret Service was an unexpected success; blending the best elements of James Bond’s charming spydom, with off-the-wall cheeky wit and an entrancing world of secret society mythos. The second installment—Kingsman: Golden Circle—was met with less favorable reactions, though fans of the franchise still loved it for what it was. The King’s Man, Vaughn’s ambitious origin story for Britain’s most elite secret intelligence agency, will likely be met with the same derision.
The film opens in 1902, before making the great leap to 1914 at the advent of the First World War. Vaughn rather comically reduces the geopolitical conflict between Great Britain, Russia, and Germany during this era to nothing more than a spat between three cousins, that comes with a prettysignificant death toll. With Tom Hollander playing triple duty as the cousins—King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and their third cousin Tsar Nicholas II—it was bound to be a piece of comedy.
A New Shepherd
In the final moments of the film, King George finds himself inducted into the newly minted Kingsman Agency by Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) and the fates of his warring cousins are revealed—including Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication and the assassination of the Romanov family. Both scenes feature a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo of a young man sporting a chillingly familiar mustached face. While these two allusions may have been enough to set up the inevitable World War II-era sequel to The King’s Man, Matthew Vaughn doesn’t stop there.
While The Shepherd (Matthew Goode) and most of his flock were dispatched by the Kingsmen, there was one sheep that managed to avoid being apprehended or killed. In the mid-credit scene, Kaiser Wilhelm’s right-hand man and advisor Erik Jan Hanussen (Daniel Brühl) has ascended to a new role, stepping into the shoes of the late Shepherd. In front of a vault filled with gold, he thanks Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl) for his assistance in liberating Russia and introduces him to the newest member of the flock: Adolf Hitler.
Not only does the mid-credit scene pay off the Hitler cameo earlier in the film, but it pays off the earlier conversation that Lenin had with the Shepherd about finding someone to help balance him out because he planned to be such a dedicated ally. The scene may not be very long, but it definitely sets the stage for what’s to come.
Fact and Fiction
While Vaughn has plenty of plans for the third Kingsmans film—including the will-they-won’t-they of Eggsy and Harry—a sequel to The King’s Man just makes sense, especially when the introduction of Erik Jan Hanussen is considered. The franchise may play fast and loose with historical accuracy, but the real-life story of Hanussen is fodder for fiction.
The King’s Man characterizes him as more of a duplicitous, yet savvy, advisor to Kaiser Wilhelm, but in reality, Hanussen was a bit more of a charlatan, known for being an occultist, psychic, and practicing hypnotist. Clearly with Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) around the film had more than enough occultism on display. But that is exactly how Hanussen found notoriety during World War I, which led to him doing astrological charts for Hitler and his advisors, accurately predicting and advising them on a number of incidents during the start of World War II. Hanussen was also Jewish, which was an open secret within the Reich. In 1933, Hanussen was assassinated, and while it’s largely believed that he was taken out by the Sturmabteilung, there is plenty of room for the Kingsman Agency to be the ones who actually take him out.
With the knowledge that Matthew Vaughn has plans for atleast seven Kingsman-related films, The King’s Man’s mid-credit scene makes it clear that he has plans to return to the prequel era of the franchise, and hopefully that means watching Oxford (or perhaps Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Archie Reid) punch some Nazis.
The King’s Man is in theaters now.