With No Sequel in Sight, Pedro Pascal’s Star-Studded Action Sequel Finds a New Streamer

It’s been eight years since Kingsman: The Golden Circle hit theaters, and while the next chapter in the spy saga remains MIA, fans are getting a silver lining this fall — Pedro Pascal’s wild, whip-cracking action sequel is finally finding a new home on HBO Max this November.

The 2017 Kingsman sequel, directed by Matthew Vaughn, brought back Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, and Mark Strong while introducing a new wave of big-name stars including Julianne Moore, Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, and Pascal as the mustachioed cowboy-agent Whiskey. If Bond is polished and poised, The Golden Circle doubled down on being loud, ludicrous, and lairy.

After the Kingsman organization is wiped out, Eggsy (Egerton) and his mentor Harry Hart (Firth) team up with their American counterparts, the Statesman — a whiskey-soaked spy group based in Kentucky. Together, they take on drug cartel queen Poppy Adams (Moore), whose Golden Circle operation threatens the world.

The film was a hit at the box office, pulling in $410.9 million worldwide, even if critics weren’t quite as charmed the second time around. While The Secret Service earned strong praise for its fresh energy and humor, The Golden Circle was seen as bloated and overstuffed — though its bonkers action, Elton John cameo, and Pascal’s smooth-talking lasso-fighting hero kept fans entertained.

Is ‘The Golden Circle’ Worth Watching?

Collider’s review wasn’t overly positive, criticizing it for having occasional laughs but ultimately, being less than the sum of its very talented parts:

It’s a movie that, in its desire to have an action scene set to “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”, will cram in a bunch of scenes with Elton John, and hope that you just have fun with Elton John playing himself. I like Elton John as much as the next guy, but he doesn’t significantly make the film stronger.

This leads to a movie that’s intermittently amusing, but for as cartoony as it gets (and it’s super cartoony), it can’t handle everything that it’s trying to do. For every scene that tries to get back to how the original upended the spy genre, such as one bit where Eggsy has to plant a bug in an unconventional way, you also have a scene like the one where Poppy has her robot dogs rip an errant henchman to shreds. I understand that the impulse with blockbuster sequels is to go bigger and bolder, but for The Golden Circle, it ends up creating a mess that deprives the film of the energy and verve of the original.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle begins streaming on HBO Max in November 2025.