Mike Mignola says Neil Marshall’s Hellboy is more horror than superhero

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

We haven't heard all that much about the upcoming HELLBOY reboot, and although I'm still a little discouraged that Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman won't get the chance to complete their trilogy, I am looking forward to seeing what a new take on the character will bring. Neil Marshall (THE DESCENT) is directing with David Harbour (Stranger Things) stepping into the lead role for a "darker, more gruesome version of Hellboy" which will be R-rated, and creator Mike Mignola recently chatted with io9 about all things Hellboy, including the upcoming film.

The last film, HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, came out in 2008, the same year as IRON MAN and THE DARK KNIGHT launched a new era of comic-book movies, but Mike Mignola says that the reboot won't be following in those footsteps. Instead, the film will more fully embrace the horror and mythology elements of the stories and serve as even less of a superhero tale than the Guillermo del Toro movies.

Well, I mean, if anything, we’re trying to do something very different. Basically, there’s no part of Hellboy that was ever going to be like other superhero movies. And the more Marvel stuff there is, the more DC stuff there is, Hellboy never really feels like—even in the [Guillermo] del Toro things—a superhero movie. It’s so much “big teams of guys, in costumes, running around and saving the world from big cosmic menace stuff…” I believe the new movie will feel even less like a regular superhero thing. The idea with this one was to make it play much less like a superhero film, to downplay the superhero elements even more than del Toro did. This one is much more folklore/mythology/horror, and not “big team rushing into to do battle with whatever kind of stuff.

In addition to David Harbour as Hellboy, the film also stars Ian McShane as Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, Milla Jovovich as Nimue, the Blood Queen, Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan, and Daniel Dae Kim as Ben Daimio.

David Harbour feels that his Hellboy will be a unique take on the character, which means that fans will hopefully be able to enjoy both versions of Hellboy, and preparing for the role also meant bombarding Mike Mignola with questions. "He would text me questions periodically with questions, like, 'Are there any animals you thought of in the way Hellboy moves?' And we were texting back and forth one night a lot about crazy stuff like that, and I finally said, 'Dude, I am tired of typing, just call me.'" Mignola said. "We must have had this two-hour conversation where we got into the way I grew up, what my brothers were like, and all this stuff that fed into what Hellboy is. The attitudes, the characters, and stuff like that… and hopefully it didn’t fuck things up, because it was way more information and backstory to the creative process than anyone would ever need. But it did make for an interesting, long phone call. And I know David has his own ideas about how to interpret the character, but it was really nice that we had this one, really long conversation about where this stuff came from."

HELLBOY is slated for a January 11, 2019 release.