David Harbour opens up about Hellboy having some “major problems”

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

To say that things didn’t go so well for the new HELLBOY movie would be putting it ever so lightly. The truth of the matter is it went up in flames in all the wrong ways and kicked off an edition of the Blame Game that’s still going on. Finger pointing aside, star David Harbour seems to be taking things in stride, and in a new interview, he uses a pretty unique, thought-out analogy to describe why HELLBOY had some pretty lofty comparisons to live up to that hurt its chances for success.

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Harbour was speaking with Digital Spy about the failure of the comic book character’s reboot, saying that people spent too much time trying to compare it to movies from the Marvel Universe. This led to some unfair judgment in his eyes, putting it in terms – of all things – chocolate flavors.

“The problem that I have with comic book movies nowadays is that I think, and it’s a result of the power of Marvel stuff, it’s like chocolate, it’s a flavor. So everybody goes chocolate is delicious and these guys make the best chocolate. So as you judge the movies, it's like, 'Well it's not as chocolatey as this, this does not taste like chocolate at all'.

He continued, “And I sort of want a world where there's more flavours than just comparisons to chocolate. So in that way when Hellboy is viewed on the chocolate spectrum, it does very poorly. That being said, it also has major problems.”

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Whatever the comparisons are, the movie was basically dead on arrival. Receiving abysmal reviews (about a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes) and opening up in third place at the box office with $12 million, only to make $21 million total after five weeks in release. Perhaps the movie could’ve recovered some of the relatively modest $50 million budget had it been released overseas, but as of now, there’s no international release to speak of.

Still, Harbour looks back on the experience as him trying to do his best to deliver something people would love. In the end, he can only do so much. “We did our best, but there’s so many voices that go into these things and they’re not always going to work out,” he said. “I did what I could do and I feel proud of what I did, but ultimately I’m not in control of a lot of those things.”

He added that there's an audience for the movie out there, and they'll likely discover the movie while they're bored on a Wednesday or trapped in the middle of the sky for nine hours. "I think as a rental or as a movie that you see on an aeroplane, I think you'd be like, 'Oh that was fun' because it's a fun movie, and I think it was unfairly bludgeoned as a result of these comparisons."

When it comes to those things that he was "not in control" of, there was a big report that comes after a report in April from The Wrap that went into the troubled production, which involved 16 producers clashing on the production. Word is director Neil Marshall and Harbour didn't get along, and that the director what shut out of many major decisions.