While rebooting Hellboy didn’t turn out so well in 2019, new plans are in motion for another live-action movie. DiscussingFilm reports that Millennium Media will be rolling the dice on the franchise again with a new live-action Hellboy movie, this one directed by Brian Taylor, director of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and the Crank films. The report notes that Hellboy creator and author Christopher Golden have been given story credits, but it’s unclear if they contributed to the actual screenplay for this new film.
The project is said to be deep into post-production with plans to start filming by April in Bulgaria. In the works under the working title of Hellboy: The Crooked Man, the film is also expected to be another reboot unconnected to the previous Hellboy movies starring Ron Perlman and David Harbour. With production slated to start soon, casting should be imminent, and the announcement of a new Hellboy may be coming very soon. Currently, the project doesn’t yet have a distributor, but the DiscussingFilm reports that studios are unlikely to invest in the project for a theatrical release, given the shortcomings of the 2019 reboot. It’s more likely to be sold to a streaming service, such as Netflix, Prime Video, or Peacock.
It will be interesting to see how this news is taken by fans, as a great many of them have long been rooting for Ron Perlman to team back up with director Guillermo del Toro for a third Hellboy film. While David Harbour is a popular actor who rose to fame with his beloved role as Hopper in the hit show Stranger Things, many fans were unwilling to accept him from the start as a new Hellboy merely because he wasn’t Perlman. With both del Toro and Perlman publicly expressing their desire to make a third film in years past, fans were bummed that the decision was instead made to introduce a new Hellboy, and it’s clear that many of them skipped the reboot as a result.
While Perlman isn’t getting any younger, and doesn’t exactly look forward to the physical punishment that would come with doing Hellboy 3, he is still open to making that movie. In January, he told The Independent that he would still make Hellboy 3 because it’s something he feels that the fans deserve.
“Am I eager to do Hellboy 3? No, I’m 71 f–king years old,” he said. “[But] we owe this to the fans, and we should give it to them because it would be an epic conclusion. So Guillermo, if you’re reading, I’m not done pounding you to get this f–king thing done.”
