Finally someone figures out how to make a movie and leave a sequel possibility without ruining the entire movie to begin with. Unlike Chris Weitz, who left a cliffhanger ending at the end of The Golden Compass even though that sequel will almost definitely never be made, Guillermo del Toro has left room for a third Hellboy movie without abruptly ending the story.

As reported in SciFi Wire, del Toro was told to consider a third movie when he began writing Hellboy II which comes out next year. “We did the first one saying, 'That's it. It's a self-concluding story.' And I said, 'Let's come up with an arc that makes sense for us for the second and third movie.”

The story in Hellboy II is self-contained, he said, but doesn’t leave out the possibility of a third. “So if there's never a third one, I'm perfectly at peace." Man, it seems like everything del Toro does makes me love him even more. Did it really take this long for a big-budget director to figure out how to work with franchises without making one installment feel like a preview for the next (I’m looking at you, Pirates of the Carribbean and the sixth Harry Potter book). Hopefully what this means it that casual Hellboy fans will come out of the second movie satisfied, while the die-hard will be shouting “We want more!” And happily, that’ll be exactly where del Toro is prepared to give them. Sequel-making at its best.