In the wake of Guillermo del Toro’s two Hellboy movies and the 2019 reboot directed by Neil Marshall, it looks like Hellboy may be returning with a fourth live action movie sometime soon.
Discussing Film exclusively reports this week that Millennium Media is “actively developing a new live-action Hellboy film, which has already been written with a director attached.”
According to the site’s sources, Brian Taylor (Crank, Gamer, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Mom and Dad) has been chosen to direct the upcoming movie for Millennium.
Discussing Film also reports that the project’s current working title is Hellboy: The Crooked Man, which might suggest it’s an adaptation of a comic book story from 2008.
In the 3-issue series, Hellboy confronts a minion of the devil in 1950s Appalachia.
The new movie could begin filming as soon as April in Bulgaria, the site also notes.
One thing we’ve learned about the Hellboy live action franchise over the years is that the movies are never quite profitable enough to justify the high costs of making them, with the David Harbour-led reboot crashing at the box office back in 2019. It made just $55 million worldwide on a reported $50 million production budget, ensuring its status as a flop.
But even the Guillermo del Toro movies starring Ron Perlman, though critically acclaimed, never made enough money to warrant more of them. Hellboy II: The Golden Army made $168 million worldwide on an $85 million production budget, which just wasn’t enough to allow for Del Toro to finish out the big screen trilogy he had intended on making with Perlman.
Where does the franchise go from here? Will Millennium’s upcoming movie – which hasn’t yet been confirmed by the company, we must note – be aiming for a theatrical release or perhaps a streaming premiere? And will the budget be slashed for Hellboy’s return to the screen, given the character’s not-so-stellar financial track record? We’ll report more as we learn it.
