Guillermo del Toro kept the flame for a third HELLBOY alive for many years, even organizing a sit-down between Ron Perlman and HELLBOY creator Mike Mignola in a last-ditch effort to continue the franchise. Unfortunately, Guillermo del Toro's dream of HELLBOY 3 died that day and it was later announced that the franchise would be rebooted. While speaking with Nerdist, Mike Mignola revealed that the upcoming HELLBOY: RISE OF THE BLOOD QUEEN didn't begin life as a reboot, but actually as a continuation of the Guillermo del Toro movies, just without del Toro at the helm.
I would’ve loved to see Guillermo do his third movie and finish that story. But over the years it became very clear that wasn’t going to happen. About three years ago the producers, the screenwriter Andrew Cosby, and I all started working on this new story. Del Toro didn’t want to have anything to do with it, he wasn’t going to direct. He was offered to be a producer, and Ron [Perlman] wouldn’t do it without Guillermo.
Mike Mignola continued to attempt to tie the new film into the Guillermo del Toro HELLBOY universe, but once Neil Marshall (THE DESCENT) came onboard to direct, Mignola decided to start from scratch, because, as he says, "a del Toro movie is a del Toro movie, and you don’t want to try and hand a del Toro movie to someone else. Especially someone as great as Neil Marshall. So that’s when it went from being this continuation to being a reboot." Mignola added that, "it’s exciting to have another director. It’s exciting to take another path, to take that material and give it another leaning." The reboot will star David Harbour (Stranger Things) as Hellboy, in what is being planned as a "darker, more gruesome version of Hellboy" which will be R-rated.
Marshall has said that the ability to embrace an R-rating will be like "taking the cuffs off," adding that they can "just make the movie we want to make." When asked whether he would embrace practical effects as much as Guillermo del Toro did for his HELLBOY movies, Neil Marshall said that the reboot is "definitely going to be as practical as we can possibly make it … I love to do stuff in camera whenever I possibly can, and use CG as the amazing tool that it is, to enhance or expand upon the world, but not to use it to replace reality, when you can do it [for] real." That all sounds rather good, but Marshall's reboot will have to be quite special in order to ease the pain of a Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman-less HELLBOY.
HELLBOY: RISE OF THE BLOOD QUEEN is expected to be released sometime in 2018.