The Ending Of Kingsman: The Golden Circle Explained
It's easy to imagine early pitch meetings for the first Kingsman movie including numerous references to James Bond. Like Bond, the agents of the titular Kingsman group are sharp-dressing, extremely British superspies. Kingsman: The Secret Service establishes protagonist Eggsy (Taron Egerton) as the latest to join the secretive Kingsman spy agency. In its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the teenaged Eggsy is a fully fledged agent, capable of holding his own on the globetrotting spy missions his job now requires. His mentor is Harry Hart (Colin Firth), an experienced superspy suffering from amnesia upon the start of the second film.
The villain of Kingsman: The Golden Circle is Julianne Moore's Poppy Adams, a drug kingpin who has poisoned her share of the world's drug supply. She uses this as leverage to pressure the president of the United States to end the war on drugs. The president, however, has no intention of cooperating, preferring that every drug user simply succumbs to Poppy's poisoning. Thus, it's up to Eggsy and co. to get the antidote out to all of Poppy's victims.
By the end of Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the world's drug-using population has, of course, been saved. The surviving members of the movie's primary cast of characters, meanwhile, seem perfectly positioned for a sequel.
Saving the world from from a damaged society
Central to the plot of Kingsman: The Secret Service is a world domination scheme involving a trendy new kind of cell phone technology. Kingsman: The Golden Circle shifts its focus from big tech to the societal treatment of drug use. The film concludes with the president arrested for his inaction in saving those poisoned by the villainous Poppy. It's not the government, then, but the members of Kingsman who save the world's population of drug users, which includes Eggsy's girlfriend (and wife by the film's end) as well as one of the president's employees. Though these two are far from the sole victims of Poppy's machinations, their proximity to both the film's hero and villain alike positions drug use as an indiscriminate trait rather than the form of maliciousness it is in the eyes of the president.
The first film's story is built around commentary on the malicious nature of the tech industry. The Golden Circle, meanwhile, positions a lack of empathy for drug users as the tragedy driving its villainy. A third film, therefore, is likely to introduce a new societal ill as the motivating force behind its story.
Setting up a sequel
Though story specifics have yet to surface about a third entry, it's been confirmed by the director of the first two films, Matthew Vaughn, to be titled Kingsman: The Blue Blood. The film is currently in development, with series prequel The King's Man scheduled to be released prior to The Golden Circle's proper follow-up.
While details about Kingsman: The Blue Blood may be scarce, the ending of The Golden Circle sets up the world of the third film in a few key ways. By the closing of The Golden Circle, members of Kingsman like the first film's Roxy and even the stalwart Merlin are dead. New to the series in the second film is the Statesman agency, the United States counterpart of Kingsman.
Statesman notably includes agent Tequila, portrayed by Channing Tatum. That said, Tequila spends much of The Golden Circle away from the action. In the film's final sequence, however, Tequila is in England sporting a bespoke British suit, suggesting greater involvement in The Blue Blood (especially given the A-list Tatum's underutilization in The Golden Circle).
The Statesman agency is also revealed in the film's end to have funded the construction of a whisky distillery (distinct from the bourbon facility owned by Statesman) to further help Kingsman recover from its early losses, hinting at the general involvement of the agency. Finally, Halle Berry's tech expert Ginger Ale is promoted to the full-fledged Agent Whisky at the film's conclusion, suggesting her involvement as well in what could be a star-studded fourth entry into the Kingsman film series.