Why is there another Hellboy reboot?

This week, there's a new Hellboy movies in UK cinemas. However, there's not as much bluster around this one as there was in 2004 when Guillermo del Toro brought the character to the big screen, or in 2019 when Neil Marshall helmed a blockbuster reboot. It's not even getting a cinema release in the USA, heading straight to video-on-demand services in October.

The new movie, entitled Hellboy: The Crooked Man, stars Jack Kesy as the titular demonic antihero, from a script co-written by Hellboy's comic book creator Mike Mignola. It's an adaptation of Mignola's 2008 limited series of the same name.

So the question is: why is the Hellboy franchise wiping the slate clean again so soon? Three different versions in the space of two decades? What is he, Spider-Man?

The response to the 2019 Hellboy reboot was vicious. That movie had originally begun life as a third entry in Del Toro's series with Ron Perlman in the title role. Mignola would explain to Nerdist that Del Toro wanted to direct his own script, but that offer wasn't on the table from the studio. Without Del Toro, Perlman stepped aside.

Once it became clear that a new Hellboy would have to be cast, all involved decided the project would be a reboot — a harder-edged, R-rated take on the character. The Descent director Neil Marshall, returning to films after acclaimed work on Game of Thrones, signed on to get behind the camera, with David Harbour as the big, red dude.

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"I think that people didn't want us to make the movie," said Harbour in 2020. "Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman created this iconic thing that we thought could be reinvented and then they certainly – the loudness of the internet was like: 'We do not want you to touch this'. And then we made a movie that I think is fun and I think had its problems but was a fun movie, and then people were just very very against it."

Hellboy made just $55m (£41m) at the global box office. Critics were against it too, with the movie currently boasting a Rotten Tomatoes approval score of just 17%, from more than 200 reviews. Its harshest critic, though, is Marshall. The director has called the movie "the worst professional experience of my life" and said there is "nothing of me" in the finished product. It's fair to say it wasn't going to kick-start a new franchise.

But Hellboy is a very popular character and rights-holder Millennium Media understandably wanted another crack at making cash. Step forward, Mike Mignola. The creator had been involved in prior films but, for the first time, The Crooked Man sees him playing a role in penning the script along with his regular collaborator Christopher Golden and director Brian Taylor.

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When the project was announced by Deadline, Millennium president Jeffrey Greenstein described The Crooked Man as "a departure from all previous Hellboy films, where Mike Mignola and the creator of the comics will finally shepherd an authentic version of his stories and characters in film form".

Taylor, best known for his work with Mark Neveldine on films like Crank, told Collider: "The appeal of this one to me, is to go back to that and do a real reset, and really give us that version of Hellboy, which I just don't think we've seen yet."

The Crooked Man, like the 2019 version, eschews the idea of an origin story and instead chooses to tell a horror-inflected story with Hellboy at the centre. The reviews, too, have been a little kinder, with GamesRadar calling it "the closest big-screen version yet to the comics". The slightly quieter release may also help, keeping the film out of the shadow of its predecessors — good and bad.

But it's really the involvement of Mignola that will pique the interest of fans. For the first time, this is a Hellboy movie with the character's original creator at its heart. If Del Toro truly isn't going to ever get to make his third movie, then this might be an adequate substitute.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is in UK cinemas from 27 September.