It’s a reboot, right? The new Hellraiser movie is upon us and everyone’s been referring to it as a reboot of the franchise, but according to director David Bruckner, it’s technically not. So what do we call it?
Bruckner sat down with ComicBook.com recently to share how he feels about whether the movie is a hard reboot or not. It seems he prefers a different word.
“I think from the jump, I understood that, to some degree, it would be a reinvention, to some degree it would have to be and that if we went too far down the path of trying to force it into a particular cannon, it would be far too specific and we’d have to choose which movies were a part of that and which movies weren’t.”
What really complicated things was when Bruckner decided they were “going a different direction with the Hell Priest.” After that decision was made, Bruckner said things “suddenly got really, really complicated to necessarily play that game and, at the same time, there were things that we liked about, that we wanted to preserve, about the original films.”
Despite this, Bruckner didn’t want to do a hard refresh on the series, even with the complications. So how much does the new stuff fit into the Hellraiser canon? Bruckner said it’s more important to enjoy the movie than it is to question that type of stuff.
“I think for me, personally, as a fan, I’m not quite so concerned about where exactly it plugs into everything that I’ve seen before, because I’m so aware of the creation process of films.” He also shared that he’s acutely aware of all the Hellraiser material out there.
“… Hellraiser’s quite expansive. It exists in literature form, exists in comic books, it exists in movies, and there’s an incredible amount of fan art on the web and some of that is quite inspiring. It lives in our imaginations in many different ways.”
Looks like we can call this one a reinvention that bakes in “elements of the Hellraiser movies that you saw before.” Sounds like fun.
Hellraiser debuts on Hulu on Oct. 7. You can read our review here.
