The original Kick-Ass made Chloë Grace Moretz a household name, but Kick-Ass 2 didn’t fare quite so well with moviegoers. Now Moretz says Kick-Ass 3 isn’t happening at all, and it’s all because of the “fanboys” who wouldn’t pay for the movie. Hit the jump to read her comments on Kick-Ass piracy.

Moretz discussed the problem of Kick-Ass piracy in an interview with Digital Spy.



Sadly, I think I’m done with the character. 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.

That Kick-Ass 3 is unlikely to happen isn’t news. Kick-Ass 2 didn’t make enough money to earn a sequel, and comic book creator Mark Millar acknowledged as much in an interview earlier this month. But he didn’t blame “fanboys” for illegally downloading the last film.

To be sure, Moretz is right about piracy in a general sense. Fans should know by now that if they want a sequel to any given movie, they need to vote with their dollars by actually paying for a ticket. Not to mention it’s just wrong to enjoy the fruits of other people’s hard work without paying for it.

But the reasoning is a bit questionable when applied to the Kick-Ass films. Despite what Moretz has heard, Kick-Ass 2 was not the most pirated movie of 2013 — it didn’t even crack the top 10. The first Kick-Ass was the second most torrented film of 2010, but that’s not why there’s no Kick-Ass 3.

So maybe it’s not so much that people didn’t want to pay for Kick-Ass 2 as it was that they didn’t want to watch it in the first place. To begin with, it was dogged by controversy before it even hit theaters. Star Jim Carrey publicly denounced the movie in the wake of Sandy Hook, and refused to do any press.

Then, when the film did open, the general consensus was that it “never came close to the energy and smarts of the first movie,” as Germain put it. What felt fresh and unique the first time around fell flat the second, and piracy isn’t to blame for that.