Boondock Saints have long hoped for another movie in the cult action franchise, and we now have confirmation that a third film is officially coming soon, with both Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery returning. According to Deadline, the pair will reprise their roles as fraternal twin Irish brothers Connor and Murphy MacManus, two unassuming vigilantes who were hunted down by Willem Dafoe as FBI Agent Paul Smecker in the 1999 debut movie. Boondock Saints writer-director Troy Duffy will join Reedus and Flanery, with the new movie set to begin filming in May 2022. Notably, the three also worked together on 2009’s The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.
“The fans have loved these characters for 20 years,” Duffy said while speaking to Deadline. “They use terms of endearment like ‘the Brothers’ or ‘the Boys.’ We left them in jail at the end of Boondock 2 and fans want to know what happened to them. Norman and Sean have been a driving force to keep this franchise on track and break some new ground story-wise. The fans have been waiting. They literally ask about it daily, and I am really excited to be working with [production studio] Impossible Dream to make Boondock III a reality.”
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In addition to expressing his excitement about the new project, Duffy also offered some insight into where fans will find the MacManus brothers in the new film. “Where we’re going is, the brothers are older. They are coming out into a brand new world that is not like the one they left,” he shared. “They are at odds. One wants to continue, the other doesn’t. There’s a new enemy out there, not like the traditional ones they’ve faced. That’s the thing that is timely about this one.”
Duffy went on to explain that he got a lot of ideas and inspiration from Boondock Saints fans for the new movie. “I asked the fan base once, who would you most like to see Connor and Murphy kill? There were like 4500 answers, and some were Biblical; people just don’t give you one-word answers. The number one answer was, politicians.”
He continued, “I wrote a scene right now where one of them says, are you f—ing kidding? You can’t kill a politician and the other saying, are you kidding me? They’re the ones doing it. It turns out one guy is doing it much worse than everyone else.”
Duffy added, “Without getting too deep into the story, what it is is, two boys coming out of prison after staying there much longer than expected, to a brand new world. They’re at odds on whether to push forward. But the type of people we face today in our society, is unlike any we’ve faced before. And that brings them together and they say, we cannot turn our backs on this.” At this tie, there is no word on when the third Boondock Saints movie will be released.
