Guillermo Del Toro hosted a recent Reddit AMA and, as you’d expect he was pretty awesome, given people plenty of bang of their buck with his answers. No one line replies here! It was always going to be a given that the director would be asked about Hellboy 3 and it didn’t take long for a redditor to drop a question in about big red and what’s the deal with Hellboy 3. To which Del Toro replied
“Well, you know, we don't have that movie on the horizon, but the idea for it was to have Hellboy finally come to terms with the fact that his destiny, his inevitable destiny, is to become the beast of the Apocalypse, and having him and Liz face the sort of, that part of his nature, and he has to do it, in order to be able to ironically vanquish the foe that he has to face in the 3rd film. He has to become the best of the Apocalypse to be able to defend humanity, but at the same time he becomes a much darker being. It's a very interesting ending to the series, but I don't think it will happen.”
While it was a lengthy answer, his response seemed a bit like a prepared press release. When I read it first I was a tad bit disappointed, but then another redditor pushed him on it again which provided an epic response
“It is a question that I myself ask of the world many times, but we have gone through basically every studio and asked for financing, and they are not interested. I think that the first movie made its budget back, and a little bit of profit, but then it was very very big on video and DVD. The story repeated itself with the second already, it made its money back at the box office, but a small margin of profit in the release of the theatrical print, but was very very big on DVD and video. Sadly now from a business point of view all the studios know is that you don't have that safety net of the DVD and video, so they view the project as dangerous. Creatively, I would love to make it. Creatively. But it is proven almost impossible to finance. Not from MY side, but from the studio side. If I was a multimillionaire, I would finance it myself, but I spend all my money on rubber monsters.”
Sadly, it wasn’t the response Hellboy fans had wanted, but at least it was brutally honest. Many people suggested a kick starter for the project, but considering that the last Hellboy movie, The Golden Army had a budget of $85,000,000 a crowd funded campaign would be a stretch to say the least. Think about it, even at the last movie’s budget, it’d need 100000 funders to stump up $850 each. As much as I adore Hellboy, and class it as one of the greatest comic book movies in history, being realistic about it, there is not that much love for Big Red.
Legendary Picture’s head honcho Thomas Tull has said in the past that’d he’d love to see Hellboy 3. And while that doesn’t mean he’ll stump up the cash, it still is a possibility. As minute as that might be, Legendary are big supporters of Del Toro. With a Pacific Rim sequel on the cards, maybe, just maybe, they might take a gamble on Hellboy 3. And yes, I’m probably being completely delusional, but we need some Big Red closure!!!
