Fans of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy—and specifically, Guillermo del Toro’s Ron Perlman-portrayed take on the stone-fisted, good-hearted bruiser—have not had a good couple of years. Neil Marshall’s recent reboot of the franchise was pretty much a no-win situation for them, after all: If it had succeeded, it would have meant more of David Harbour’s take on the character, and if it failed—which it did, to the tune of a bit less than its relatively small $50 million budget—well, then who would want to see another Hellboy movie, regardless of who was in front of or behind the camera? Either way, fans hoping to see del Toro’s vision of Hellboy 3 were out of luck.
Even more than they might have thought, as it turns out: ScreenRant reports that there was actually a chance for fans to get a look at del Toro’s intended conclusion to his little comic book franchise, but it was shot down by Mignola himself. Del Toro apparently approached the BPRD creator years ago about adapting his ideas for Hellboy 3—which would reportedly have seen Big Red finally wrestle directly with his destiny to doom the world, and which was eventually (over many, many rewrites) worked into the plot of Marshall’s movie—into a comic book, but Mignola said no. Per an interview published today, he expressed concerns at having a comic book version of Hellboy out there that wasn’t the main take on the character:
You know, I think del Toro mentioned it to me once, and I said no. I think, let the comics be the comics. Comics are confusing enough for people. Let’s not have two different versions of the Hellboy comic out there. My vote would be “no.”
That’s very in-line with comments del Toro himself made way back in 2013, telling Collider that, “I talked to Mike about making it a comic and Mike said very clearly, ‘Hellboy the movies is yours, Hellboy the comics is mine; I don’t wanna confuse them.’” (Fun fact: Del Toro was also bemoaning the box office “failure” of Hellboy II, which made a measly $75 million more than its budget , a number that now probably looks a whole lot more rosy to the studios in question.) Mignola also mentioned in the ScreenRant interview that part of the process of transforming the prospective Hellboy 3 scripts into a reboot package included stripping out “del Toro-isms” (which, from del Toro’s old comments, sounds like stuff like the romantic relationship between Perlman’s Hellboy and Selma Blair’s Liz, or the movies’ portrayal of Abe Sapien) from the film’s universe:
At the beginning, the idea was, how do we go from the Del Toro movies to continue into this storyline? Plot-wise, it’s always been similar. When the decision was made to reboot, it was really just a matter of saying, “well, okay, let’s take the Del Toro-isms that we put into the original script, let’s take those out. You know, I don’t know that there’s anything in there that really carries over that’s specifically Del Toro. It was more of an effort we made of putting those Del Toro-isms in there. It was easy to take them out. I know that was one reason why Neil Marshall wanted to do the Hellboy origin sequence, even though it was covered really well in Del Toro’s movie. He wanted to put his own spin on that, so it was a different version of the Hellboy origin scene.
So, yeah: Hellboy 3. Even deader than originally thought!
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Well this is…. wow. I really don’t know what to say here (I was initially madder, I thought that they literally took Del Toro’s Hellboy 3 script and rewrote it, but they just rewrote a script only they had started working on and hadn’t finished, which Del Toro didn’t work on…. which is still not good). But we’ve seen at least 8 versions of Spider-Man in the movies, and no one seems confused at all. Why couldn’t Mignola just call it Del Toro’s Hellboy or some shit? They’d make more money on that than they did on the movie we got.
Anyways, I was hoping that the new Hellboy would succeed, since who couldn’t like Ian McShane? And David Harbour looked like a great Hellboy replacement. Instead the producers fucked everything up with a craptastic script making things worse.
Although in hindsight its hilarious Harbour complained about it being compared to Marvel movies and now he’s in one.
Didn’t Mignola actually contribute to the script? *makes throwing things into the sink gestures*
Fun fact: Del Toro was also bemoaning the box office “failure” of Hellboy II, which made a measly $75 million more than its budget , a number that now probably looks a whole lot more rosy to the studios in question.Box office gross is split with theaters and the budget doesn’t include marketing or distribution costs. So likely Hellboy 2 either broke even or lost a bit of money during its theatrical run (it’s budget was $85M). Given del Toro has said he wanted Hellboy 3 to have a bigger budget and scope than 2 and the studio didn’t want any part of it because of the results of 2, the results absolutely were a failure and del Toro is right to bemoan them.
True. But “broke even or barely lost money, likely turned a small profit on home video” sounds a lot better after “Made less than its budget worldwide, likely will forever be in the red” happened to the reboot.What looked then like a modest failure looks a lot more like a push if not a modest success now.
I don’t agree, it’s not a success from the studio’s point-of-view even if it does make a small profit on the backend. The studio didn’t invest tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to make a small profit, they did it to make a big profit.And it should go without saying, but missing profit projections can have a big impact to people who work or invest in a company. And it obviously had a big impact on del Toro’s chances of making a third film.
Yes. But we’re talking about hindsight from 2019 where going in a different direction lost them tons of money, as opposed to not losing tons of money.
Both situations are failures though. Yes the reboot is a bigger one, but it doesn’t change how Hellboy 2 did or that its performance resulted in a pretty entertaining franchise (IMO) ending prematurely. I’d assume we aren’t getting any new Hellboy movie of any form anytime soon now.
I wish Del Toro had been able to make his third Hellboy movie, but I am with Mignola on this. The Hellboy comics are very intricate and their own thing and hard enough to keep straight. Possibly I am somewhat influenced in this by recently trying to catch up on the BRPD anthologies and at times genuinely being lost, though I think they are mostly great.
The Hellboy/BPRD comics have almost always been “good”, but rarely great. And often pretty bad! They’re generally overrated. (then again, Del Toro’s films are no great shakes, either, especially HB2.)
Nah, they’re good, especially compared to the garbage of their fellow superhero comics (and Hellboy is a superhero comic)
A thing you like! I mean sure, expressed in the same sentence as you saying something else is terrible, but this is progress
Mignola is really great at atmosphere and world building but the stories themselves are often weak or start out strongly but fizzle out. Also I don’t know why he spent so many years refusing to draw the comics himself and trying to find an artist who would draw them exactly the way he would except not as good; his artwork is a huge part of the appeal. Drawing must be really thankless compared to writing, so many artists stop drawing completely the second they get taken seriously as a writer.
To that I’d add: characters. Hellboy is a great IDEA for a character, but he’s a complete blank. As are most of the other principle characters.Ditto on the artist thing. If you’re going to hire artists, let them do their thing, not just slavishly copy your minimalist style.
I agree with you completely, except for the “I’m with Mignola on this” part.
I always got the impression that Mignola wasn’t happy with Del Toro’s take on his character
Which is a shame, since it’s a better take!
LOL, fuck no dude. Hahaha
It’s not a MUCH better take, as the Del Toro movies are just okay and overrated. But, then again, so is the comic book. Good ideas and good world-building with (largely) dull execution.
Good
Abe Sapien? What makes you think that was a Del Toro idea?Oh right. fish fish fish
fish fish fish
Sexy fishman
Sexy fishman
abe was in the comics too, i think they were talking about del toro’s take on abe.
wait you mean Del Toro showed up and there was a nekkid fish man just waiting for him?
I decided to watch the new Hellboy on the plane because I wanted to see how terrible it was without spending money on it or wasting free time on it. It was unsurprisingly bad. The side characters are a whole bunch of meh. The FX is good but not as good as the practical effects of Guillermo’s. The one liners are ass. It just makes me question why. In every way it’s worse.
Just imagine that if the plane crashed and that movie was the last thing you saw.
The sweet embraces of hell couldn’t embrace me sooner.
Well, this seems sensible. After all, as everyone knows, all of the classic comic book characters throughout history, like Batman, Superman, etc., have only ever had one single, rigidly defined interpretation in the comics.Anything else would just have been too darn confusing!
While I love his comics work, everybody tells me that Mike Mignola is an ass as a person. I pretty much think they’re right.
Those characters are owned by major publishers, while Hellboy is owned by his possessive creator.
But that’s not really the point. Mignola’s character is either big enough to be able to survive – and thrive – with multiple interpretations – or it’s a tiny, niche property that will forever remain in the little leagues.
There’s nothing wrong with a character having a defined writer and a limited number of stories. Not everything needs to follow the traditional comic book superhero
format of being endlessly rewritten and reinterpreted for decades. The world doesn’t need Bone comics without Jeff Smith or Sam & Max comics by someone other than Steve Purcell and everyone seems fine with that, but for some reason if you make the main character something resembling a superhero, anything less than the Marvel / DC formula of endless regurgitation constitutes a failure.
Batman and Superman comics are great examples of how shitty and stupid Hellboy could have become if Mignola’s books had made the same mistakes. Excellent support for how Mignola is completely correct!
I just watched the new Hellboy last night and was very…meh, about it. It just didn’t quite hit the mark for me. There were some moments that showed what could have been.
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Hellboy II probably lost money if we add in marketing costs and the like right? Which brings to mind, why do we always go by a film budget that doesn’t include marketing, which is a big piece of the “should we make another one” discussions? It’s like when NFL contracts are announced and they’re just a total of incentives most players never reach, what’s guaranteed there, and in movies what’s actually spent should be the totals we look at.
Studios love having a bunch of extra lines of ‘costs’ to hide their profits. This is especially true when they have profit sharing contracts with talent. Tim Burton’s Batman was a blockbuster, but WB said that it didn’t make a profit. It didn’t make so much of a profit that they immediately green lit a sequel by the same director with the same actors.
Same claims with Raimi’s 1st Spiderman and the original Lord of the Rings trilogy…gotta love studio morality.
Mignola again proves himself smarter than most people working in his industry.