There’s a new Hellboy movie coming, though Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman won’t be involved this time. Instead, a full-fledged reboot, Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen, slated for release next year, is underway, and it’s going to be rated R. In a new interview, Neil Marshall — director of some of the best Game of Thrones episodes (“Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Wall”) — said the new film’s R-rating is allowing him and the filmmakers absolute creative freedom to make the movie appropriate for the popular character.
Last week on Post Mortem, a horror podcast hosted by filmmaker/author Mick Garris, Marshall discussed his plans for his R-rated vision of Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen, which will star David Harbour (Stranger Things) as the candy-eating demon. In short, the movie will embrace the original comic’s “kind of bloody” material, and it will be filmed as practically as possible, with limited use of CG.
“We’ve been granted permission to do it R-rated, which for me is just like taking the cuffs off,” Marshall told Post Mortem. “It’s like, ‘Okay, so now we can just make the movie we want to make. Nobody’s going to stop us.’ So, that’s the main [difference].”
On his film’s use of practical effects versus CG, Marshall said it will be “as practical as we can possibly make it.”
“I love to do stuff in camera whenever I possibly can,” the director said. “[We will] use CG as the amazing tool that it is, to enhance or expand upon the world, but not to use it to replace reality when you can do it [for] real.”
Marshall also mentioned that the success of R-rated Marvel movies like Deadpool and Logan have also opened the doors to more R-rated movies based on comic books, but his Hellboy isn’t just trying to copy them. “Obviously, the success of things like Deadpool and Logan have not hurt that cause,” he said. “But, also, when you go back to the original material, it is kind of bloody, so I’m going to embrace that.”
Listen to Neil Marshall’s episode of Post Mortem here.
Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen will be released in 2018.
