Hellboy is looking to make a comeback but, to the potential dismay of some fans, the original creative team isn’t on board for the potential reboot.
Millennium is in negotiations with producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin for a new installment that would reboot and relaunch the property. Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Entertainment is also producing. Guillermo del Toro isn’t involved, nor is franchise star Ron Perlman, the actor who inhabited the red-skinned, cigar-chomping devil in the two previous installments.
Neil Marshall, the horror director who broke out with The Descent and won raves for his work on Game of Thrones, is attached to direct the project, which has a working title of Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen and has a script by Andrew Cosby, Christopher Golden and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. David Harbour, the star of Stranger Things, is in talks to play Hellboy.
Hellboy was created in 1993 by Mignola and became an indie comic hit as it told of a demon, raised by a professor, working to fight supernatural evildoers for an organization called Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. Del Toro co-wrote and directed the first adaptation, which was made by Revolution Studios and released by Sony in 2004. The movie made $60 million domestically (another $40 million internationally, asterisked by the fact that this was the era before international box-office dominated performance) on a budget of $66 million. The second movie was made by Universal with the same team — del Toro and Perlman — but its box-office mojo was cut short when The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan and featuring Heath Ledger as the Joker, opened six days later.
The films did receive a huge cult following despite minimal box office returns and a third film has always been talked about but high budget concerns with del Toro at the helm have always been one of the obstacles holding them back so the reboot route isn’t much of a surprise.
