Hellboy Reboot: What Went Wrong?

Hellboy Reboot, with Stranger Things fame David Harbour, was supposed to be a new beginning for the Half Demon superhero. But the new movie was nothing like it was expected to be. It did not do well at the box office and the reviews were super-bad. The movie was not only a disappointment to the fans but also to the producers. The question is what went wrong that caused the failure of the film. Here are a few things that the new production messed up with 2019’s Hellboy.

The Fans’ Allegiance

The previous maker of the film – Guillermo Del Toro and Hellboy Ron Perlman had talked about the third film of the franchise, as producers shifted the property to a reboot. But as time went by it became a fantasy. In an interview in 2018, Perlman revealed that he and Del Toro were trying to get the third film made but he failed. And that being replaced was like an “open wound”. This made the fans of the real films steer away from the new reboot.

Messy Narrative and Poor Pacing

The Hellboy 2019 movie was filled with too many characters and storylines. The narrative was so overloaded with subplots that it became hard to keep track. Plus the movie is so fast-paced that none of the storylines get enough room to actually impact the audience. This was because the makers tried to adapt 15 years of stories from the comics into one movie. It made the movie overloaded with information that most fans weren’t able to follow.

Too Much Exposition

The dialogues in the movie expose about 60% of the happenings in Hellboy 2019. It was done in an attempt to help the audience understand all the extra subplots the movie had overloaded itself with. Because of too many plots, they included too many dialogues of characters explaining the events. Fans hated being spoon-fed in such a manner. So many dialogues talking about characters and events weren’t something the audience enjoyed. It was almost like watching a lecture on the supernatural than an action film.

Paper Thin Characterization

With too many characters included in the plot, Hellboy 2019 was bound to end up with many shallowly written characters. The fast pace of the movie was another reason. Due to not enough time given to any of the plots, the characters get no arc and end up looking shallow. No character has been given enough space to let them grow and for the audience to understand the purpose of their actions or behaviors.

It Retreads Past Grounds for the Worse

The Del Toro Hellboy is presented as an old man with the mental age of a pre-teen. The way that the previous movies presented him made the character seem funny. The makers of the reboot did the same thing to their version of Hellboy. But it has been done before and makers were’t able to present it as well as Del Toro did. It did not work well with the audience.