Hellboy reboot could be next big R-rated comic-book movie
No Guillermo del Toro. No Ron Perlman. No problem?
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola (and official social media accounts of the upcoming Hellboy reboot), awoke a long-dormant movie fan base after revealing the first official image of David Harbour (Stranger Things), as the horned, stone-handed, fan-favourite Dark Horse Comics character.
Lionsgate and Millennium film will produce the R-rated Rise of the Blood Queen, Neil Marshall directing, arriving in 2018. Del Toro and Perlman, despite producing two moderately successful Hellboy films, were limited in what they could take from Hellboy’s dark comic books. You could almost say they were working with a Heckboy. Their two movies, Hellboy ($59.6 million domestic, $99 million worldwide, 2004), and Hellboy II: The Golden Army ($75.9 million domestic, $160 million worldwide, 2008), were born in an era when the comic-book-movie rating norm was PG-13. (What might del Toro, a director who specializes in dark visuals, have done with an R-rated Hellboy movie?)
Not helping matters then was both Hellboy movies sharing a release year with R-rated Punisher movies (not made by Marvel Studios), that bombed. The Punisher, (2004), starring Thomas Jane, and Punisher: War Zone, (2008), starring Ray Stevenson.
Deadpool, of course, changed everything.
The raunchy and comedic R-rated adaptation of one of the most popular Marvel Comics characters showed that when done right (in the case of Deadpool, sticking to the source material and not trying to reinvent the character), Hollywood studios could rethink expansive franchises by going dark with their comic-book movies.
If Hellboy is going to stand out on its own as an R-rated comic-book movie, the best thing it can do is embrace the darkness.
With a character named Hellboy who deals in the supernatural, and a wealth of otherworldly comic-book source material, that shouldn’t be a problem.