Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy 3 will always live in infamy as one of the most famous comic book movies that was never made, and based on the quality of the first two installments, there was every chance we could have been talking about one of the genre’s all-time great trilogies.
For well over a decade following 2008’s The Golden Army fans waited with bated breath for any sort of update on Big Red’s third outing, but despite coming tantalizingly close on several occasions, Hellboy 3 never managed to get the go-ahead to start production. Del Toro and his star Ron Perlman knew exactly what direction the story was headed, but like a large number of projects that the Pan’s Labyrinth director signs on to, nothing ever came of it.
What we got instead was a reboot, which turned out to be so unbelievably awful that many people were left scratching their heads wondering why del Toro and Perlman never got the chance to bring their trilogy to a close following two critically-acclaimed movies in a row when studio execs were willing to fund a $50 million dumpster fire that tanked at the box office and was savaged in almost every review.
With both the original and rebooted takes on the character dead in the water, you would have thought that Perlman would have given up on the idea of getting back under the makeup for one final round. However, despite claiming in the past that he’d moved on, the actor confirmed that he most definitely hasn’t when revealing he still holds out the tiniest shred of hope for a return.
“There’s always a little ember, that lives deep within me, that says maybe one day Guillermo will wake up and go, ‘You know what? F*ck, we need to finish this trilogy’. But, that’s where we were, one film away from finishing. But then, every time I see how busy he is and what he’s engaging himself in, it doesn’t seem like it’s realistic. It doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to happen, but that doesn’t prevent me from living in hope.”
Given that Guillermo del Toro has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the movies and TV shows that he didn’t make, it unfortunately seems more remote than ever that Hellboy 3 will ever happen, and that’s saying something for a project that’s been caught up in so much will they/won’t they speculation over the years.
