A couple of new images from director Matthew Vaughn's upcoming war epic, The King's Man, have now been released, showcasing our dapper heroes as they come together to create the world-saving secret service team. Jumping back a few decades, The King's Man will detail how the organization began, led by Ralph Fiennes as the original King's Man, the Duke of Oxford, and Harris Dickinson is his headstrong son, Conrad.

The first image depicts Fiennes and Dickinson during what looks to be a pretty intense conversation with Lord Kitchener, played by Charles Dance, and his aide-de-camp, Maximillian Morton, Matthew Goode. The image also finds the characters standing in a very familiar setting, the Kingsman tailor shop. The second image features Polly played by Gemma Arterton, and Djimon Hounsou's character, Shola, discussing what to do with Rhys Ifans' villainous Grigori Rasputin.

Along with the images, Vaughn did also divulge some details regarding where his inspiration came from for The King's Man, with the director revisiting John Huston's classic adventure The Man Who Would Be King, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, and wondering if he could craft something equally epic. "I [previously] watched it as an audience member, and then I suddenly watched it now as a director," he said. "When I finished it, I was like, 'Why is no one making movies like this any more?' They're epic. They're an adventure. They're poignant. They've got messaging. It had it all, and, I think, the best Connery performance of all time. He's just spellbinding. So That was it. I said, 'Shit, I want to make a movie like that.'"

Though Vaughn initially struggled to work out how, exactly, he could sell such an old-school idea, he eventually landed on folding these same elements into a Kingsman prequel. "I thought about pitching to Hollywood, 'Guys, I want to do an epic adventure like The Man Who Would Be King,'" Vaughn continues. "Every door would be slammed in my face as usual, and they'd go, 'No one wants to watch movies like that.' So I was like, 'Alright, well, how do I do this?' And then I was thinking about Kingsman as well, and I thought, look, if I do the history of the Kingsman - which I knew what it was when I wrote the first one - it felt like I'd get my cake, and eat it."

The King's Man finds a collection of history's worst tyrants and criminal masterminds gather together to plot a war to wipe out millions of people and destroy humanity. One man and his protégé must race against time to stop them, as the movie reveals the origin of the elite secret service. The King's Man is directed by Matthew Vaughn, who wrote the screenplay with Karl Gajdusek. The movie will act as a prequel and the third film in the Kingsman: The Secret Service series, which is loosely based on the comic book series Kingsman, created by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar and published by Marvel's Icon Comics imprint.

Director Matthew Vaughn has also confirmed that the upcoming prequel will lay the foundations for Kingsman 3. Despite going back decades, and involving a whole host of brand-new character, Vaughn did reveal that the movie will help set up the future of the franchise when it returns to the main timeline. "We've put seeds for what's going to happen in Kingsman 3 all the way back into this. And it's going to be very different," the director said recently.

Following a delay due to the ongoing global circumstances, The King's Man is now scheduled to be released on 16 September 2020 in the United Kingdom and on 18 September 2020 in the United States. This comes to us courtesy of Total Film's official Instagram account.