In 2004 I attended an advance screening for a film called Hellboy. It was an ok film, but the best part was the free red frosting cupcakes they were serving after the movie.
I consider myself a comic book fan from back in the day (as in when I was young and thought that a 401K was an adult electronic toy that vibrates) but I was never aware of the characters outside the Marvel and DC worlds. Hellboy was a name I had heard but knew nothing about. I liked the movie and I thought the visuals were great but it never managed to generate as much buzz as say Nolan reinventing Batman or even Singer taking on the man of steel (and proving that he could ground Superman faster than a speeding bullet).
The film was released to decent reviews and box office and wound up grossing $99 million worldwide on a $66 million budget. Now four years later Universal is about to release a sequel, Hellboy 2. But does a $99 million worldwide film warrant a sequel?
Last year I had trouble understanding why they were making a sequel to Fantastic Four when the first movie looked like it was shot by Helen Keller. But the first film had grossed over $330 million worldwide so a sequel was inevitable. In 1997 I laughed my butt off at an advance screening of Austin Powers but the film never really caught on grossing roughly $50 million in the U.S. When Mike Myers’ creation hit home video it exploded and warranted a sequel which ended up pulling in over $200 million in the U.S. alone. But has Hellboy really been a DVD phenomenon? Were people telling their friends that they had to see this movie about a guy with filed down horns? I don’t think so. So that brings us back to the original question, why would they greenlight a sequel to a movie that was never really a hit?
Maybe the answer lies with the director, Guillermo Del Toro. After helming the original Hellboy, Del Toro wrote and directed Pan’s Labyrinth which was probably one of the most original films in story, visuals and tone to come out of Hollywood since Neil Jordan shocked us all with a quick pan down in The Crying Game.
There are very few directors working today who can put such stunning visuals on the screen the way Del Toro and his imagination can, and the ones that can conjure up such images usually lose track and sacrifice the story for those effects (Have you seen Star Wars Episode 1?). Not Del Toro. He manages to use his effects to tell a better story and if you haven’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth you might be an idiot (I said “might”).
Clearly Del Toro is not just a hero to a bunch of comic book geek film junkies who write columns on internet sites and long to party with Brett Ratner, Hollywood has sat up and taken notice and he will be directing the two upcoming Hobbit films in New Zealand. So maybe Universal woke up and said “Hey, this Del Toro guy is pretty good, let’s let him make a sequel to Hellboy if he wants to and that way when we need a favor we’ll know who to call”
“What kind of favor?”
“You know, like if we want to do a remake of Cutthroat Island next year, we’ll know who to call.”
“That’s why you run this studio, you’re always thinking and you dress so fine’”
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