It looks like Hellboy 2 has a release date, and if it actually arrives in theaters I’ll never have been happier to be wrong. After the original (and quite good) movie flopped in theaters, I pegged the Hellboy sequel rumors as nothing more than wishful thinking. After all, it’s not often that money losing movies get more money to lose. After Director Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy 2 project was kicked out of the studio where he’d set it up, I seemed destined to be proven right... but ended up being only half right. Ok, maybe 40% right, because he managed to talk someone else into funding it, and here we are.
The Movie Blog has picked up a story from Horror-Movies which says that Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is set to arrive on August 1, 2008. For those keeping track, that’s a summer release. Let’s think about that a minute. The original Hellboy was released in March, a month with pretty weak competition, and couldn’t cut through the noise well enough to turn a sufficient profit despite great reviews and great word of mouth. Yet somehow, Universal believes their sequel can not only turn a profit, but do it in the heavily contested, superhero filled summer months? Del Toro must have one hell of a script.
It may help that Guillermo is trimming the fat. Creator Mike Mignola tells ComicsContinuum that some characters from the first movie won’t make the cut into the second. In specific, he names Agent John Myers as being dropped for the sequel. Apparently the character was created by Del Toro specifically for the first movie, as an “everyman” we could all identify with. Now though Mignola says, “He just didn't fit into the story. We worked on getting him in there. But it would have been the case where he was the young naive guy, can we come back to that guy five years later where he's turned into a bit more of a street-wise agent? For whatever reason, it didn't quite fit.”
Hellboy 2 is supposed to start shooting this April. If it does, I suppose I’ll I have to accept this crazy world of inexplicably topsy-turvy studio logic which has allowed it to get made. That’s alright. If I have to be wrong, this is a good kind of wrong to be. As long as an Elektra sequel isn’t next.
