The recent announcement that Hellboy was getting the reboot treatment, with David Harbour (Stranger Things) in the starring role, surprised many. The film is on the fast track, and is shooting for a release date that is sooner rather than later. It was a brazen move for the franchise, that had some success with director Guillermo del Toro at the helm.
According to Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, the film was not progressing quickly these past few years, and then out-of-nowhere the project grew legs. In a recent interview with Multiversity Comics, Mignola spoke about how it all happened:
‘It’s been in the planning stages for more than three years. I have been involved in various stages along the way It’s a very bizarre one because at some point I brought Chris [Golden] in because our regular writer was kind of going in circles, so Chris and I took a stab at it. I don’t want to write this stuff, but Chris and I would work together and we’d talk about it on the phone and he would write it up, and we would bang specifics back and forth.
So Chris got involved for a little while, then he had other things he had to do, so it went back to the other writer, and then another writer came in eventually, and I assumed it was never gonna happen. It would get almost done – when Chris and I were working on it everyone was like, “Yes! Now! We’re really happy. It’s great. This is what we want to do,” and then suddenly, “Why don’t we make it a reboot?”
Once it became a reboot, at first we thought we’d just take out the little details that pertain to the del Toro stuff. But once you start doing that then the whole thing starts coming apart, and then you start putting it together differently, and I just thought it would never end.
Then when Millennium Films agreed to make the movie, suddenly it went from, “This is never going to happen” to “Oh, we’re making it tomorrow.” That’s been crazy. That’s a big thing for [2017]. It’s gone from this thing that you kind of don’t pay attention to to “Oh s–t, we suddenly gotta cast a movie because it’s starting to film in two months.”
Mignola also says that he is deeply involved with the film, and answers questions almost daily, especially during the early stages of shooting. It appears that this new Hellboy will follow the comics closer than the films before it.
Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen is set to hit theaters in January 2019.
