Last year, director Neil Marshall brought Hellboy back to the big screen with an emphasis on horror and an edgy R-rating. It turns out audiences weren’t all that interested in the indie comic book hero. Without the visionary director who made the first two Hellboy movies into cult favorites, ticket buyers decided to check out Shazam! instead. Rather than reboot the franchise, Hellboy (2019) put it out of its misery.

Hellboy was created by artist Mike Mignola in the early nineties. Mignola has used the freedom of creator-owned comics to tell a variety of stories on his own timeline. Hellboy comics deal with the occult, but they mix elements of horror with other genres. The format changes according to the demands of the individual story and the tone can range from dark to silly.

Mignola’s creation has a loyal fanbase but it was never intended to sell as many copies as mainstream superhero comics. Outside of comic shops, most people had probably never heard of Hellboy prior to the release of the first movie in 2004. Even afterwards, it’s not like the movies made Hellboy a household name.

Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy came along at just the right time. Del Toro was still building his Hollywood resumé. His previous movie was Blade II. His next would be the Oscar-winning horror-fantasy, Pan’s Labyrinth. If del Toro was going to take on a minor comic book character, this was the perfect point in his career to do so.

It was also one of the few times when studios would be interested in such an offbeat superhero. Following the success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Hollywood was on the search for anything that might duplicate that success. Marvel was licensing characters left and right. If audiences like Spider-Man that much, surely they would check out Daredevil and Ghost Rider.

The interest in comic books as source material extended beyond Marvel properties. Even non-superhero comics got in on the action. Movies like American Splendor, Bulletproof Monk and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were based on sequential art (aka comics). It didn’t take long for Hollywood to realize most of those movies didn’t sell a lot of tickets. But for a time, they were willing to roll the dice on a weird indie comic.

The first Hellboy movie was reasonably well-received by critics and audiences. It opened in first place at the box office and reviews were mostly positive. But that wasn’t enough to make Hellboy a hit. Facing strong competition from The Passion of the Christ, Hellboy failed to recoup its production costs in the US.

With international ticket sales included, Hellboy fell just short of the $100 million dollar mark. That’s not a disaster, but it’s also not the kind of performance that guarantees sequels. Hellboy II probably wouldn’t have happened if not for the success of Pan’s Labyrinth. Oscar gold gave del Toro the clout he needed to continue his hoped-for trilogy.

But The Golden Army didn’t fare much better than the first Hellboy. The second movie enjoyed mostly positive reviews and a first-place opening at the box office. But after the first weekend, the sequel sank like a stone. It didn’t help that The Dark Knight completely sucked the air out of the room the following weekend.

Despite the middling box office performance of both movies, there was still interest in completing the Hellboy trilogy. Del Toro talked about the possibility frequently. The thing about del Toro is that he has boundless imagination. At any given time, he has several movies he would like to make. A lot of del Toro projects will never see the light of day. Hellboy III would turn out to be one of them.

The viability of the franchise was always tied to the fortunes of its director. After Hellboy II, de Toro went on to make the sci-fi monster movie, Pacific Rim. Like the Hellboy movies, Pacific Rim under-performed in the US. But it did extremely well internationally. So much so that Pacific Rim got a sequel despite bombing domestically.

Meanwhile, Legendary Pictures was watching and waiting. At one point, de Toro was attached to direct The Hobbit. If that had done well, they probably would have green-lit Hellboy III. But those plans fell through. Then del Toro said the future of the third movie depended on the performance of the Pacific Rim sequel. But del Toro didn’t end up directing Pacific Rim: Uprising so that didn’t work out.

Instead, del Toro went on to make The Shape of Water. It was easily the biggest hit of the director’s career and won several Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director. All of the sudden, del Toro was in the driver’s seat. He could make another Hellboy movie if he wanted to. But what he still want to?

On some level, yeah, he wanted to. But if del Toro was going to make a third Hellboy movie after winning an Oscar, it was going to be on his terms. During the years in which the future of Hellboy III was uncertain, Mike Mignola worked with writer Andrew Cosby on developing the script. That was a deal-breaker for del Toro.

Del Toro was offered a producer credit on the sequel as he had been on Pacific Rim: Uprising. But he wasn’t interested in attaching his name to someone else’s Hellboy. When he left, Ron Perlman left with him. So the decision was made to reboot the series. Mignola said the decision was an easy one, “A del Toro movie is a del Toro movie, and you don’t want to try and hand a del Toro movie to someone else.”

That’s for sure. The question is, what is Hellboy if not a del Toro movie? To answer that question, the producers tapped British director Neil Marshall. Marshall had made a splash over a decade earlier with the claustrophobic horror movie, The Descent. Since then, he’s mostly done television shows like Game of Thrones and Hannibal.

From the beginning, Marshall set out to make his Hellboy different from del Toro’s. The fantasy elements were replaced with blood, violence, and gore. The movie’s new star, David Harbour, promised that this was not going to be an artsy fantasy picture. “This movie is gory, I mean it’s like a horror movie. There’s a lot of blood in it. It’s brutal.”

Brutal was an apt choice of words though perhaps not in the way that Harbour intended. The reviews for the movie were brutal. Critics blasted the movie. Harbour later complained that the reboot was unfairly compared to Marvel movies.

“So everybody goes, ‘chocolate is delicious,’ and these guys make the best chocolate. So as you judge the movies, it’s like, ‘Well it’s not as chocolatey as this, this does not taste like chocolate at all.’ And I sort of want a world where there’s more flavors than just comparisons to chocolate. So in that way when Hellboy is viewed on the chocolate spectrum, it does very poorly.”

It did pretty poorly in other ways. For example, Hellboy (2019) was by far the lowest grossing movie in the series. Despite 15 years of inflation, the new Hellboy earned less than half of what del Toro’s original movie pulled in. While the first two movies both opened in first place at the box office, the reboot trailed Shazam! and the comedy Little.

Adding insult to injury, Hellboy was one of the top nominees at the Golden Raspberry Awards. It received a total of five nominations including Worst Director, Worst Actor and Worst Screenplay.

Despite co-star Mila Jovovich’s insistence that Hellboy would go on to become a cult classic, Harbour eventually admitted that the reboot had missed the mark. “I don’t think the perception was that it was a hit, and so in that way, I don’t know that the risk is worth it.”

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