Sorry, superfans, it's starting to look like “Hellboy 3” just ain't gonna happen.
Just days after revealing some details about “Pacific Rim 2,” prolific director Guillermo del Toro expressed his doubt that the aforementioned other sequel will ever get made, despite the fact that he and star Ron Perlman are both interested.
During a Reddit AMA on Friday, del Toro admitted that the proposed threequel based on Mike Mignola's comic book series just can't find studio backing.
“Creatively, I would love to make it. Creatively,” he confided. “But it is proven almost impossible to finance. Not from MY side, but from the studio side. If I was a multimillionaire, I would finance it myself, but I spend all my money on rubber monsters.”
2004's “Hellboy” cost around $66 million to produce and earned just under $100 million worldwide. With a budget of around $85 million, 2008's “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” earned a healthy — but hardly stellar — $160 million globally.
Although it likely won't ever make it to the big screen, del Toro has a plot in mind.
“The idea for it was to have Hellboy finally come to terms with the fact that his destiny, his inevitable destiny, is to become the beast of the Apocalypse, and having him and Liz face the sort of, that part of his nature, and he has to do it, in order to be able to ironically vanquish the foe that he has to face in the 3rd film,” he described. “He has to become the best of the Apocalypse to be able to defend humanity, but at the same time he becomes a much darker being. It”s a very interesting ending to the series, but I don”t think it will happen.”
Del Toro's “Crimson Peak” will be in theaters in 2015, while his new FX series “The Strain,” premieres this Sunday.