Boondock Saints 3 In The Works, Troy Duffy, Norman Reedus, And Sean Patrick Flanery Returning
Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery are ready to go back to the boondocks. Reedus and Flanery will reprise their roles as the fraternal vigilante twins, Connor and Murphy MacManus, in "The Boondock Saints III."
Deadline reports that Flanery will pen the script with director Troy Duffy "with a lot of input from Reedus." This marks a slight departure from the first two films, which Duffy wrote and directed himself. The original "Boondock Saints" hit theaters in 1999, and in the decades since it's developed a cult following. A sequel, "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day," arrived in 2009, but after that, it seemed the series was done.
In 2017, Flanery posted a message on his official verified Twitter account saying that neither he nor Reedus were "involved in any way" in "The Boondock Saints III." However, Duffy told Deadline that "Flanery was in many ways the driving force in getting done the current draft ... and whatever differences they had have been patched."
Since the last movie, Reedus has gone on to great fame as Daryl on "The Walking Dead," but the main show is in the middle of its final season and is set to wrap up next year. Before he motorcycles into a "Daryl and Carol" spin-off series with longtime co-star Melissa McBride, he'll be filming his part in "The Boondock Saints III," which begins shooting in May 2022.
Keeping Up with the Times
As for Flanery, outside "The Boondock Saints III," he will reportedly appear as the Judge Dredd parody, Gunpowder, a corrupt advocate of Second Amendment Rights, in season 3 of Amazon's "The Boys." His "Boondock Saints" character, of course, is known for his gun-toting brand of vigilante justice, but the first movie had the misfortune of landing not long after the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, directly impacting the film's marketability.
Duffy had this to say about the direction of "The Boondock Saints III":
"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. 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. 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."
Given what happened on January 6 of this year with the storming of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., it's a bit scary to hear people's number one answer there. Hopefully, as "The Boondocks Saints III" takes shape, it can avoid comparisons to such real-life incidents and just give fans a sequel they can enjoy.