'Hellboy' 2019: David Harbour Reboot Will Be More Faithful to the Comics

The next Hellboy movie will look a lot more like Mike Mignola’s comic books that started it all. In a new interview with Hellboy director Neil Marshall, the filmmaker said that his team often referred directly to the comics, which he called “pretty sick.”

In an upcoming feature set to be published in the January 2019 issue of Empire, Marshall explained how much his hard-R Hellboy, set for theatrical release on April 12, 2019, will be faithful to the Hellboy comic book series that began in 1994. The new film, which stars David Harbour (Stranger Things), is a reboot that bears no connection to the first two films directed by Guillermo del Toro.

“It was always a case of, ‘When in doubt, go back to the source material.’ Some of the stuff is pretty sick,” Marshall said. “More violent and more bloody. We weren’t making it with handcuffs on.”

Marshall, who also directed the 2005 horror film The Descent as well as episodes of Game of Thrones, Black Sails, and Constantine, previously used a “cuffs” metaphor to describe his approach to the movie. In a June 2017 interview with the podcast Post Mortem, Marshall said his team was granted “permission to do it R-rated, which for me is just like taking the cuffs off.”

“It’s like, ‘Okay, so now we can just make the movie we want to make,” he said at the time. “Nobody’s going to stop us.’ So, that’s the main [difference].”

Empire also released a new still from Hellboy featuring Harbour in full costume and makeup he’s running down a dark corridor.

When talks for a highly-anticipated third Hellboy movie broke down for del Toro, Mignola and screenwriter/comic book creator Andrew Cosby began work for a reboot that will be distributed by Lionsgate. The new film stars Harbour as Hellboy, along with Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, and Daniel Dae Kim in a role originally intended to be played by Ed Skrein, until Skrein dropped out after accusations that the film was white-washing the character.

Hellboy will be released in theaters on April 12, 2019.

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