Fans were understandably disappointed that regular collaborators Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman never got the chance to finish their Hellboy trilogy, despite spending years trying to secure the funding and coming agonizingly close on a couple of occasions. The first two installments didn’t do huge numbers at the box office, but received widespread critical acclaim and did solid business on home video. However, the studio still wasn’t willing to take the plunge and bring Big Red’s story to a close.
Instead, the decision was made to reboot the character, which in hindsight was a terrible choice. Stranger Things star David Harbour did the best he could with the material, but the movie itself was nothing short of awful and is generally regarded as one of the worst comic films in recent memory, bombing at the box office for good measure after failing to even recoup the relatively modest $50 million budget in theaters.
You get the feeling that it would have worked out much better for everyone involved if they’d just let del Toro and Perlman make Hellboy III, especially with the original and sequel The Golden Army enduring as cult favorites, not to mention the director’s increased standing in the industry following his Academy Award-winning The Shape of Water.
However, studio politics has always been a notoriously tricky minefield to navigate and while Perlman previously revealed that he was offered the chance to reprise the title role in the reboot, he admitted in a recent interview that he prefers not to think about the movie at all.
“It was none of my business. It would only provoke me into whatever things I didn’t need to add to my list of grievances.”
Clearly, the subject is still a sore point for the 70 year-old, and even though he still holds on to the dying embers of hope that it might actually happen, at this stage we’re probably more likely to see another reboot than getting del Toro and Perlman back to bring their take on Hellboy to a fitting conclusion.
