After wowing the crowd at December's Butt-Numb-A-Thon (including our own John Gholson), the ultra-violent smart-ass superhero flick Kick-Ass is coming back to Austin for a more formal bow as the Opening Night Film of SXSW 2010 in mid-March.

The hype's only been exceedingly positive for Matthew Vaughn's comic-book adaptation, and Lionsgate was probably only willing to shell out a reported $50 million to distribute it if they thought they'd be making that much back and then some. Aaron Johnson (pictured), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad), Chloë Grace Moretz (500 Days of Summer) and Nicolas Cage (The Wicker Man) star; the film opens proper on April 16th.

SXSW won't reveal its complete program for a few weeks yet, not until early February, but they did reveal a couple of additional titles:

  • Aaron Katz is following up his Dance Party, USA (SXSW '06) and Quiet City (SXSW '07) with a new feature called Cold Weather
  • Sebastian Gutierrez is following up last year's Women in Trouble with Elektra Luxx, all about Carla Gugino's pregnant porn star from that funny film
  • A documentary about Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister entitled Lemmy and destined to draw in some of the SXSW Music crowd
  • A documentary called SATURDAY NIGHT, directed by James Franco and all about the work that goes into an episode of "Saturday Night Live" (I'd imagine that it happens to be an episode that he happened to host)
The festival will also have the first public screening of the new IMAX outer-space doc, Hubble 3D, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. Peter Martin caught the announcement of both Hubble and Luxx through SXSW's latest mailed-out newsletter a few days back; he also made mention of a documentary all about Allen Iverson.

Man, from the look of things, if you're a fan of fact-based film, this year's SXSW is going to kick ass regardless of the opening night film.