Guillermo del Toro’s two Hellboy movies have remained cult favorites ever since they were first released, with fans enthralled by the huge level of detail in the production design, the deep level of world-building and Ron Perlman’s performance as the title character. Both installments received strong reviews from critics but didn’t exactly set the box office alight, earning a combined total of a little over $260 million globally.
Unfortunately, the profit margins weren’t big enough for Sony to greenlight the proposed trilogy-closer, and Hellboy 3 remains one of the most famous unmade comic book movies ever. Del Toro and Perlman spent years trying to get it made, but the project eventually collapsed and as is the case these days when something with a little bit of name value falls apart, a reboot was swiftly announced.
Despite the best efforts of Stranger Things star David Harbour, who gave his all in the lead role, Neil Marshall’s new version of Hellboy wasn’t a great movie. The Dark Horse adaptation was absolutely savaged by critics and tanked commercially, failing to even recoup its $50 million production budget, and it seems unlikely that we’re going to see Big Red back on our screens any time soon.
Harbour has never shied away from Hellboy’s failure, but in a recent social media interview, the 44 year-old claimed that the movie was doomed to fail because the fanbase were unwilling to accept a new installment that didn’t involve del Toro or Perlman.
“I think it failed before we began shooting, because I think that people didn’t want us to make the movie, and for some reason there was like a big… Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman created this iconic thing that we thought could be reinvented and then they certainly, the loudness of the internet was like, ‘We do not want you to touch this’. And then we made a movie that I think is fun and I think had its problems, but it was a fun movie and then people were just very, very against it, and that’s people’s right but I learned my lesson in a lot of different ways.”
No offense to David Harbour, but Hellboy didn’t fail because the fans were unwilling to accept a reboot, it failed because it was terrible. History has shown that reboots of beloved properties can find critical and commercial success if they’re handled correctly, but despite his best efforts, the comic book flick spectacularly failed to hit the mark.