Every time that director Guillermo del Toro is linked to a new project, which is often, fans will be the first to ask why he chose that project over completing his trilogy and making Hellboy 3. While taking part in a Reddit AMA, the director was asked this very question and provided a sobering answer for fans anticipating the final chapter.
“Well, you know, we don’t have that movie on the horizon,” he wrote. “But 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 has to become the beast 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 later added: “I think that the first movie made its budget back, and a little bit of profit, but then it was very very big on video and DVD. The story repeated itself with the second already, it made its money back at the box office, but a small margin of profit in the release of the theatrical print, but was very very big on DVD and video. Sadly now from a business point of view all the studios know is that you don’t have that safety net of the DVD and video, so they view the project as dangerous….Creatively, I would love to make it. Creatively. 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.”
The first film in the series was released in 2004 and grossed just under $100 million at the global box office. Its sequel, which hit theaters just a week before Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, grossed over $160 million at the global box office.
