Jim Carrey has made roughly 40 films and only three of them came out of comics. There is The Mask in 1994, Batman Forever in 1995, and then an eighteen-year gap before Kick-Ass 2, which opened on August 16, 2013, and remains the last one. That alone makes it strange. What makes it genuinely odd is what happened eight weeks before it reached theaters, when Carrey went online and said he could no longer support the movie he had already finished making. It is remembered now, when it is remembered at all, as a celebrity blow-up. Going back through what he actually wrote and what everyone around him actually said, however, that is not what it was and the real version is more interesting than the version people repeat. It involves three short messages, a reply from the man who created the character, a detail about the role that almost never gets mentioned, and a box office number that nobody involved ever hung on him.
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What makes this worth revisiting is how little of it matches the shorthand. Carrey did not walk off the production, did not attack the people who made it, and did not ask for his footage to be cut. He finished the job, kept the credit, declined to promote it, and explained himself in roughly sixty words total before going quiet. Mark Millar, who wrote the comic and had every commercial reason to be furious about losing his biggest name eight weeks out, answered with a statement that reads less like damage control than like a writer thinking out loud about what his own book was for. The film opened soft and became the end of the series rather than the middle of it. Thirteen years on, Carrey has not made another comic book movie and has never revisited the decision in public. All the pieces are on the record. They simply do not assemble into the story that stuck.
What Carrey Actually Did Was Three Tweets And Then Thirteen Years Of Silence
On June 23, 2013, Carrey posted that he had completed his work on Kick Ass 2shortly before the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adult staff members on December 14, 2012. His post specifically noted that “in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence.” The first message ran into the old 140-character limit on what used to be Twitter and cut off mid-word. Twelve minutes later, he posted the rest of it: “I meant to say my apologies to others involved with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.”
An hour after that he answered a follower who pushed back, and that was the end of it. Three messages, sixty-three minutes, an apology to his colleagues, and an explicit statement that he was not ashamed of the movie. He gave no interviews, sat for no press, attacked nobody, and in the thirteen years since he has never publicly returned to the subject. It is worth being precise about the distinction, because almost every retelling blurs it: he did not disown the film or the people who made it. He declined to promote it. Our own report at the time called it distancing, which is the right word.
The Detail That Gets Left Out Is That His Character Never Fires A Gun
Carrey plays Sal Bertolinni, who fights under the name Colonel Stars and Stripes, a born-again former mob enforcer who assembles a team of amateur costumed heroes called Justice Forever. It is a supporting part, and the character is killed off well before the end. The relevant thing is that Colonel Stars and Stripes does not use firearms. He carries a baseball bat and an attack dog named Eisenhower, and that was a deliberate feature of the role rather than an accident of staging. When the follower challenged Carrey that night, asking why earlier shootings had not changed his mind, his answer was one line: “It did, over time. That’s why my character doesn’t use bullets. Evolution.”
Mark Millar, who created the comics with artist John Romita Jr., later said the no-guns element was part of what drew Carrey to the part in the first place. This is also not the first time Carrey had said something about the subject of guns and gun control. Three months before the tweets, in March 2013, he released a satirical gun-control video called “Cold Dead Hand.” So, the decision was not a swerve. It was continuous with a position he had been arguing in public all year, applied for the first time to his own work.
Mark Millar’s Reply Is The Part Worth Reading Twice
Young masked hero Kick-Ass (AARON TAYLOR-JOHNSON) and the blade-wielding Hit Girl (CHLOË GRACE MORETZ) return for the follow-up to 2010’s irreverent global hit: ”Kick-Ass 2”.
After Carrey’s tweets made headlines, Millar responded the next day, June 24, in an open letter on his own website, and it is a more careful piece of writing than it usually gets credit for. “As you may know, Jim is a passionate advocate of gun control and I respect both his politics and his opinion,” he wrote, “but I’m baffled by this sudden announcement as nothing seen in this picture wasn’t in the screenplay eighteen months ago.”
Then the line everyone quotes: “Yes, the body-count is very high, but a movie called Kick-Ass 2 really has to do what it says on the tin.” And the actual argument underneath it: “Ultimately, this is his decision, but I’ve never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real-life.” It’s worth noting that Millar is not a neutral party on the depiction of violence generally, and his remarks in that same period about using sexual assault as a plot device drew sustained criticism from inside the industry. But on this specific question he was making the standard case, and making it without hostility. He praised the actor’s performance a month later, saying Carrey almost steals the movie. Director Jeff Wadlow was warmer still: “you never know what that guy is going to do or say.” Chloë Grace Moretz, who was 16 at the time, said she disagreed with Carrey while respecting his right to say it.
The Movie Underperformed, And Nobody Involved Blamed Him For It
Kick-Ass 2 cost about $28 million to make and made roughly $60.8 million worldwide, against $96.2 million for the 2010 original. The reviews collapsed even further than the receipts did: the first film sits at 78% on Rotten Tomatoes from 264 critics, and the sequel sits at 32% from 214. It is tempting to draw a line from a missing star to a soft opening, but the record does not support one. Universal’s head of distribution said afterward only that they were disappointed not to match the first film’s opening, and did not mention Carrey.
Contemporary box-office analysis put the shortfall down to demand for a sequel nobody had asked for. The only quantified claim anyone made ran in the opposite direction, with Millar estimating the argument had generated something like $5 million worth of free attention for a film that cost $28 million to make. There were also calls from fans for Carrey to hand back his fee, which never went anywhere and which no reporting ever substantiated. Moretz, for her part, later said she was done with Hit-Girl, and the franchise stalled for more than a decade before Matthew Vaughn began rebuilding it.
Carrey released Dumb and Dumber To fifteen months after Kick-Ass 2, and then did not headline another studio picture until Sonic the Hedgehog in February 2020, a gap of five years and three months. The two things he put out in between were a tiny independent film in which he does not speak and a shelved thriller that arrived to a 0% critical score. When he eventually explained the retreat in December 2024, he said he had wanted to get “out of people’s faces,” and he has never linked it to this film or to that summer.
It is a coincidence of timing but it remains a very unusual point in his overall career. His last comic book movie is the one he stopped standing behind, and shortly after it he stopped making movies for half a decade. He is back now, with a fourth Sonic dated for 2027, having announced a retirement in 2022 and reversed it in 2024 with the most Jim Carrey explanation available: “I bought a lot of stuff and need the money, frankly.”
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