Hellboy fans are currently looking forward to seeing the reboot of the Dark Horse Comics character that’ll be hitting theaters next year, starring David Harbour as the Right Hand of Doom. However, the excitement’s tinged with a sense of sadness, too, as director Neil Marshall’s reboot comes at the cost of the long-touted trilogy closer to Guillermo del Toro’s first two Hellboy films.
As bummed as fans of those cult favorite movies are that the third installment never happened, imagine how star Ron Perlman must feel. The actor has often seemed reluctant to discuss the reboot on past occasions and during an in-depth chat with Collider, he revealed why. Apparently, the topic of Hellboy is still an “open wound” for him, as he’s so disappointed that he and del Toro never got to finish what they started.
“I felt like we owed the fans closure, and there were too many people moving in too many other directions and I just couldn’t pull it off. So if you ask me about it, it’s kind of still an open wound.”
Perlman went on to say that it’s the many years he spent, in his words, “poking and prodding the bear” – i.e. drumming up interest in a third movie and trying to get it off the ground – that’s left him so upset that it never came to pass. Especially because he knows that del Toro had a fantastic idea for the story that would have wrapped everything up in a neat bow.
“I never thought it was going through, but I did know that Guillermo had an amazing idea of how to close the trilogy. It was theatrically so dynamic. If you were a fan of the first two Hellboys, not only were you going to have the top of your head blown off by how it resolved, but you were going to get the payoff in the investment because it was always designed to be a trilogy.”
2008’s Hellboy: The Golden Army ended on something of a cliffhanger, as Big Red’s girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) revealed she was pregnant with triplets. Del Toro has previously teased that his Hellboy 3 would have had the titular character face up to his destiny as the Beast of the Apocalypse and become a much darker being than we’re used to, which is certainly something we would’ve liked to have seen.
Hopefully in time though, Perlman and his fans will accept that the third movie never happened. And on the bright side, at least we have the new Hellboy coming this April.
