Boondock Saints is officially coming back, but without original director Troy Duffy

Good news dudes, bros, and bro-adjacent dudes! As threatened a couple of years ago, a new Boondock Saints movie is officially in the works—but there is a slight catch. According to Deadline, original stars Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery will return as the lovably violent MacManus brothers, but original director Troy Duffy (who made the original and the 2009 sequel All Saints Day) will not be directing this one. Production company Thunder Road (which also produces the John Wick movies, for the record) is currently looking for a new director.

Duffy, meanwhile, plans to write “a series of books about the Saints, continuing their story that way.” Good for him, that’s cool (though it does kind of imply some kind of “creative differences”-style split).

We don’t know much about this, but Deadline says Thunder Road and Dragonfly Films (which owns the rights to the series) are calling this “a universe expansion.” Maybe that means it’ll be about the Saints going on an adventure somewhere beyond Boston? There are Irish people in Chicago, and they could probably use Connor and Murphy to do some vengeance on their behalf, right? Maybe there’s a third brother they’ve never met or talked about before, and he’s the one who dyes the river green every year? Maybe he’s played by John C. Reilly?

Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day ended with the Saints going to prison, leaving breadcrumbs for a story about Connor and Murphy having prison adventures, but now it’s been 15 years since that movie. Seeing as how they were justified in all the people they killed (probably, who can say?), they’d be out of there by now. Unless they had to escape and have been hiding out in a different city… maybe one that has a green river and a significant population of people with Irish heritage? Just throwing that out there.