When the long-awaited first trailer for the upcoming Hellboy reboot dropped earlier this week, the footage wasn’t quite what viewers were expecting, having heard previously that Neil Marshall’s film would offer a darker, more horror-indebted take than the two Guillermo del Toro movies. But while the preview wasn’t exactly the gruesome affair that many fans were hoping to see from the director of The Descent, there was still a little blood in the mix, which explains why this more family-friendly green band trailer has now been released.
Though the new teaser, viewable above, mostly sticks to the footage from the red band version, we do get a quick clip of David Harbour’s title character punching Ben Daimio, played by Lost star Daniel Dae Kim, which is probably enough in itself to make this green band trailer almost as violent as the original.
Nonetheless, with the movie confirmed to have an R-rating, it’s likely that the promotional material has just been holding out on the gore. Indeed, Harbour just recently insisted once more that the film “is gory… it’s like a horror movie. There’s a lot of blood in it. It’s brutal.”
Again, this wasn’t especially the vibe we got from the trailer, which seemed surprisingly light in tone and heavy in punchlines, but perhaps it’s just a matter of misleading marketing. In any case, though a lot of fans are starting to get nervous, Lionsgate still has a few more months to win over skeptics and convince audiences that a Hellboy movie doesn’t need del Toro or Ron Perlman to be worth a trip to the theaters. And we’ll find out how they fare when the film comes out on April 12th, 2019.