The Hellboy reboot could be the next big R-rated comic-book movie, even without Ed Skrein
After earlier PG-13 adaptations which were only moderately successful at the box office, fans await a new director’s darker take on the horned lead character from Dark Horse Comics, to be played by David Harbour
No Guillermo del Toro. No Ron Perlman. No problem?
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola (and the 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 be producing an R-rated Hellboy with Neil Marshall directing, arriving in 2018. Del Toro and Perlman, despite producing two moderately successful Hellboy films, were perhaps limited in how much they could take from Hellboy’s dark comic books.
You could almost say they were working with a Heckboy. Their two movies, 2004’s Hellboy (US$59.6 million/HK$465.5 million domestic, US$99 million worldwide) and 2008’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army (US$75.9 million domestic, US$160 million worldwide), were born in an era in which the comic-book-movie rating norm was PG-13. One can only wonder what del Toro, a director who specialises in dark visuals, could have done with an R-rated Hellboy movie.
Not helping matters back then was both Hellboy movies sharing a release year with R-rated Punisher movies (not made by Marvel Studios) that bombed. 2004’s The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane, and 2008’s Punisher: War Zone, starring Ray Stevenson, weren’t able to turn into multi-movie franchises and likely had many studio execs thinking PG-13 was the way to go when adapting a comic-book property.
