Guillermo del Toro Reveals the Plot of Hellboy 3

There’s good news and bad news for fans of the Hellboy movies: Guillermo del Toro has publicly revealed what the plot of the final film in the trilogy would be, but also explained that Hellboy 3 is currently “impossible to finance.”

The first two Hellboy movies weren’t major hits by the standards of modern superhero movies: Hellboy (2004) grossed only $99 million worldwide, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) only fared a little better, grossing $160 million in theaters. But both films did well on home video. The problem is, the promise of home video success isn’t as enticing to studios anymore now that physical media is dying out.

“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,“ Guillermo del Toro explained in a Q&A on Reddit. “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.”

But Guillermo del Toro did reveal what the plot of Hellboy 3 would be about, if the tides change dramatically and it ever gets the green light.

“[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,“ Guillermo del Toro revealed. “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.”

Even in a perfect world, Guillermo del Toro already has two new films taking up his time for the next three years: Pacific Rim 2 and an as-yet-untitled low budget black-and-white creature feature. It seems increasingly unlikely that fans will ever get to see Hellboy 3 at all. Sigh… being a geek really can be Hell.

This Week in Film News – Week Ending 07/18/14

William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.