Mike Mignola has been much more involved with the upcoming reboot than he was in Guillermo del Toro’s previous Hellboy installments. Mignola is co-writing the film with Andrew Cosby (Eureka) and Christopher Golden (Ghosts of Albion) and it will be produced by Lionsgate Entertainment. The film will be directed by Neil Marshall, who fans may know as the director of the underrated horror film The Descent (2005), so he's no stranger to the horror genre.
This past Tuesday, Mignola sat down with the guys at io9 to discuss how the new iteration of the Dark Horse Comics character will differ from how he was portrayed in Del Toro's films. In the interview, Mignola doubles down on the idea of the movie drawing more from the horror genre than ever before, and also says that the upcoming reboot won’t be like the superhero movies that are currently dominating the box office every year.
“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 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.'”
We already knew the upcoming
Hellboy reboot will be rated-R, unlike
Hellboy (2004) &
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), so a darker and more serious tone can definitely be expected. Mignola’s point is well taken though: there’s a huge difference in scale and tone between
Hellboy and something like
Avengers: Infinity War or
Wonder Woman, and that gap is only going to grow larger as superhero films continue to raise the stakes with every film released.
Mignola was later asked what he thought the main thing DC and Warner Bros. needed to do in order to translate artist Jack Kirby’s
Fourth World to the big screen successfully in the newly-announced
New Gods film:
"It’s cool-looking stuff, but I have no idea how you would or should translate that stuff. Granted, I didn’t watch The Inhumans TV show, but with that Kirby stuff, you need a real big budget to do it big enough. I haven’t been a fan of most of the DC stuff either. Part of it is that they aren’t my characters and they seem sillier to me than most of the Marvel characters. So, how do you do the Kirby stuff? I don’t know. It’s… so huge. I think some things just work better as comics than they do as movies. I know, these days, everyone thinks everything needs to be a movie. Some things just work better as comics. The trick is always going to be getting somebody to translate that stuff who understands what works about the original.
How do you feel about Mignola's comments about a darker, more serious Hellboy film? Do you agree with him about the translation of comics to the big screen?
Let us know in the comments section below!
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