Only in Hollywood could the decision to reboot what had the potential to be one of the modern era’s finest trilogies end so disastrously that another reboot was announced in short order, but that’s the scattershot thinking behind the increasingly desperate attempts to carry on the Hellboy franchise.
Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman’s duology may not have set the box office alight on either occasion, but the 2004 original and sequel The Golden Army both proved profitable in the long run thanks to strong home video sales, as well as scoring serious acclaim from critics and audiences alike. Despite that, the pair’s futile attempts to will the third and final chapter into existence ended in failure.
Neil Marshall and David Harbour were tasked to reinvent Big Red, only for things to turn out so badly that the actor keeps a picture of the character in his home as a reminder of just how severely he dropped the ball, which is fair because it’s comfortably one of the worst superhero stories and reboots to come along in a long time.
Undeterred, the director of the widely-trashed Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance knocking out The Crooked Man with Jack Kesy in the lead on a fairly meager budget funded by a production company known for knocking out consistently terrible genre films was decreed as the wisest move, with the film having wrapped shooting and found a distributor in Ketchup Entertainment, an outfit responsible for a massive back catalogue of flicks you’re more than likely never heard of in 99 percent of cases.
We’re not saying it’s doomed to fail, but the pointless reboot of an abhorrent reboot of two minor classics is hardly instilling the skeptics with much in the way of confidence.