David Harbour on the lessons learned from Hellboy

David Harbour broke out in a major way when Netflix’s Stranger Things creeped onto the streaming platform in 2016. Since then, his movie career has been a small collection of hits and misses, with no bigger flop than 2019’s Hellboy.

David Harbour not only acknowledges how big of a critical and commercial failure it was, but also took away an important lesson. “I learned not to f*ck with established IP, that’s for sure. A beloved and established IP. I mean, I guess that’s the biggest lesson learned. I feel like whatever failures or successes that movie was, of which there are many, the movie itself had such a thing going into it that it was like almost impossible.”

And yet, it was most definitely possible, as the box office numbers show. Hellboy made just $21.9 million domestically off of a $50 million budget. Worldwide, it made a total of $55 million. So no, there won’t be a sequel.

Prior to this, Harbour had said, “Immediately when [the project] began, even when it was announced, I realized that people did not want that character reinvented. I was very naive and optimistic about what we were going to do.”

While not everyone hates Hellboy, that it was seemingly enough to put David Harbour off of pre-existing properties should be a good indication that the reboot didn’t get close to living up to the legacy of the Guillermo del Toro/Ron Perlman movies. For comparison, those movies have an 81% and 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, while the Neil Marshall-directed version has a 17%.

Harbour currently stars in Violent Night, which is faring well at the box office.

What did you think of 2019’s Hellboy? What did they get wrong or right with the material? How did David Harbour do in the reboot? Let us know below!