We’ve been hearing for more than a year now about Hellboy 2. Director Guillermo Del Toro has insisted that another movie is happening over and over and over again, even though the first one barely managed to break even and was generally ignored by everyone except the most dedicated leg-humping fanboys.

Throughout, I’ve insisted that Hellboy 2 will never happen. There’s just no way a major studio is going to invest the money necessary to make an effects heavy movie like that happen when there’s virtually no chance that it’ll make much of a profit. Well for once, it looks like I may have been right.

Richard over at Filmstalker has dug up a brief article on Superherhype which indicates that Sony may have dropped the film, which was to be titled Hellboy 2: Golden Army. It’s being reviewed by other major studios, which means Del Toro is looking for someone else to pick it up and give him the money he needs to make it happen. It looks like Sony is no longer interested in being in the unprofitable Hellboy business.

Fact is, there isn’t a lot of demand out there for another Hellboy movie. There wasn’t a lot of demand for the first Hellboy movie, as demonstrated by it’s mediocre box office performance. If no one really showed up for the first one, what makes anyone think they’d show up for the second?

Sometimes hanging out on the internet too long can skew your perception of reality. For instance, from the crazed hunger on the internet for Serenity, you might have expected it to be a huge success. But usually, it’s a small number of hardcore fans making a lot of noise. That’s the case with Hellboy as much as it was with Serenity. I really liked Hellboy, but the truth is that there’s no real market for more, and there never was much of a market for it in the first place. Hellboy 2 has no future.