Next month, a brand-new take on Hellboy will be hitting theaters. Unlike Guillermo del Toro's version, the 2019 Hellboy takes a bit more direct inspiration from the comics and takes several cues from a storyline called The Wild Hunt. Hellboy has some stiff competition in April, but should the film do well enough, producer Lloyd Levin said that there are already a couple sequel ideas mapped out, but not in any way that's set in stone.
In the new film, Hellboy (David Harbour) takes a trip over to Great Britain to battle the Blood Witch Nimue (Milla Jovovich). The story involves everything from dragons to undead armies to Excalibur to flaming crowns. Most of these were elements in a comic book storyline called The Wild Hunt, which serves as partial inspiration for the reboot.
As such, there’s some direction to take the story, should Hellboy be greenlit for a sequel. All of it is pretty much right there in the comics written by Mike Mignola, which served as the DNA of the establishing the reboot. So, while there is nothing etched in stone, producer Lloyd Levin told Collider that they have an idea where the story would go in a sequel.
Not in a No. 2 will be this and No. 3 will be that, but you can tell yourself. If this starts with The Wild Hunt, the track is laid from there in the comic books where you could go.
Hellboy doesn’t just take from one aspect of the comics. While there is plenty of The Wild Hunt in there, the story also has Hellboy boxing demons in Tijuana, which is from Hellboy in Mexico. The story also draws from Darkness Falls and The Storm and the Fury, and is more like a collage of stories, according to director Neil Marshall.
One thing it isn’t is a greatest hits. It’s a coherent story but it certainly dips into several different stories that Mignola put together, so I suppose it’s a collage of sorts, but we made a through-line that connects everything.
According to Levin, Mignola was involved “in the genesis” of the movie. Mignola and fellow Hellboy comic writer Chris Golden even wrote a draft of the script together. To keep things in the spirit of the comics, the movie shot for an R-rating because the comics don’t really get shy when it comes to violence. Per Levin:
The comic books themselves are R rated. There’s buckets of blood, there’s beheadings, there’s an intensity that equates naturally and organically to the R rating.
You can see a comic book accurate Hellboy in, well, Hellboy, out in theaters on April 12. To learn more about the film, here is what we know so far.
