The announcement of the Hellboy reboot was surely a bitter pill for Ron Perlman to swallow. He’s always talked about how much he loved playing the character and from all accounts, is a huge fan of Mike Mignola’s comics.
Ever since the release of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, both he and director Guillermo del Toro have been trying to make a third and final entry in their series, which would have finally gotten to grips with the impending apocalypse and Big Red’s involvement in it. With this reboot, however, those plans have obviously been scrapped, and while it’s an admittedly anticlimactic end to such a gripping and at times deflating saga, you can’t deny that this new take on the character looks very promising.
But why exactly did the producers decide to ditch Hellboy 3 and go with a reboot? Well, in a recent conversation with Deadline, Mignola touched on this, explaining:
“We went back and forth on that. Early on there was some idea of continuing the storyline that del Toro had started but would that be fair to a new director? So we decided to just start over. Neil is a horror director, so the idea then was to make a darker film. If you are going to use a guy, let him do what he does best. So we went through the script taking out the del Toro-isms and in some ways go out of our way to make sure we are doing a different Hellboy with its own distinct character [as a project] but still adhering to the comics.”
Though we would have loved to have seen a continuation of del Toro’s series, Mignola makes some fair points here. And like we said above, the reboot’s shaping up to be pretty awesome so far, with a much darker and mature take on the titular hero promised.
David Harbour of Stranger Things will take point as the cigar-chomping monster hunter this time around, who partners with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense to defend Earth from threats unknown. And while the movie industry will always hold Del Toro’s Hellboy movies in high regard, the fact that Big Red’s creator is deeply involved in the production tells us that the 2019 flick will be pretty faithful to the source material when Hellboy pummels its way into theaters on April 12th, 2019.