Hellboy is a 2019 superhero film based on the Dark Horse Comics series of the same name. The film is directed by Neil Marshall and stars David Harbour as the main character. Supporting actors include Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Daniel Dae Kim, and Thomas Haden Church. This is the Hellboy film series' third live-action feature film.
The comics, Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, The Storm and the Fury, and Hellboy in Mexico serve as inspiration for the movie. In the film, Hellboy battles with his own existential crisis while attempting to stop a resurrected sorceress from dominating the world. While many superhero films do extremely well at the box office, Hellboy did not. Though it was meant to be a reboot of the franchise originally launched by director Guillermo del Toro, the 2019 movie fell short. Hellboy generated $44 million worldwide against a production budget of $50 million. "Hellboy failed to spark excitement this year due to a poor release date, awful reviews, and other factors," as per Business Insider, which put the movie on its list of the 16 Biggest Box-Office Flops of 2019. But where did this adaptation actually go wrong?
Messy Narration & Fast Pacing
The Hellboy 2019 film had far too many characters and plot threads. The story was so dense with subplots that it was difficult to keep track of everything. Furthermore, the film was so fast-paced that none of the tales had enough time to have an impression on the viewer. This was due to the filmmakers' attempt to condense 15 years of comic book stories into a single film. It packed the film with information that most fans couldn't keep up with. Screen Rant even noted that “Hellboy seems overly concerned with adapting everything from the comics that fans may love and less focused on a telling an entertaining standalone story. The result is a movie that may be more faithful to the comics, but struggles to keep viewers invested in everything going on for its full two hours.”
Characters Need Time To Develop
Hellboy was destined to have a large number of characters with weak writing since there were too many characters in the narrative. Another factor was the movie's quick pacing. The lack of time allotted to each narrative caused the characters to have no arc and appear superficial. No character, not even Hellboy himself, was given enough room to develop and for the spectator to comprehend why they act or behave the way they do. Polygon even went so far as to say, “It takes the two-and-a-half hour film roughly 45 minutes to introduce its secondary characters,” and called the film “more [of] a Wikipedia list than a movie.”
Too Much Dialogue Re-Explaining Past Films
The conversations in the film tell the viewer most of the events in Hellboy. While this was done to assist the audience in grasping all the extra subplots that the film had overloaded itself with, it failed to allow viewers to enjoy the movie. The scriptwriters added too many conversations of characters describing events because there were too many stories. The film also went back and described plotlines from the past Hellboy films in a way to make sure movie-goers understood everything, but it was too much and fans despised being spoon-fed the storyline in this way. The audience did not appreciate hearing so many discussions about personalities and events because it made the movie feel more like a lecture than an action-adventure film, like the original Hellboy movies.
The Fans of the Original Are Important
As time passed, the idea of a third Hellboy film with Del Toro and Ron Perlman became a fantasy. While another film in the franchise with Perlman was discussed, per a Comic Book Movie interview, his loyalty to Del Toro prevented him from accepting and producers ultimately decided to go with a reboot with Harbour instead. This made fans of the original two films quite angry, and they boycotted the reboot, causing it to not do as well as it could have. 2019 Hellboy actor Harbour said via Instagram Live “I think it failed before we began shooting because I think that people didn’t want us to make the movie.” Fan loyalty is a real thing and producers need to recognize that if something has as strong of a cult-like following as Hellboy, it needs to be done right. The truth of the matter is no one can top Del Toro, and they shouldn’t try.