Legend
Averaged about 4 movies a year over his career. The heights of his late 90s early 00s productivity will never be matched
Panos Cosmatos fucks up taking a shot at Nic Cage’s doppelgänger.
Usually I’m not feeling reboots of franchises from just last decade but I didn’t think Del Toro’s films came anywhere close to capturing the source material’s essence, save for some of the production design.
So I am cautiously optimistic about this!
on the contrary: if Del Toro couldn’t do anything good with hellboy, how the hell is some second rate british hack supposed to?
as a filmmaker Del Toro is a 3rd rate hack who should have just been a production designer 8)
BRING ON THE SECOND RATE TALENT
ok whatever, if del toro couldn’t do something, how could someone objectively worse than del toro do something.
Broad qualitative statements re: talent points brought to the table or whatever are meaningless.
I think a thoroughly average technician with a couple of mostly decent action/horror movies under his belt might be the person to midwife a property like Hellboy to basically adequate screen life.
A lot of the problems with Del Toro’s movies were the ways the material seemed to encourage him to wallow in the more annoying corners of his fetish palace until it was nothing but a big ball pit where every ball was one of this testicles and none of those testicles looked like the source material anymore.
I wanted RED balls Guillermo!
On the other hand I think Neil Marshall is an incompetent who has built a career on forgettable action/horror irony-rental schlock and a bunch of episodes of prestige tv, a genre dedicated to filling me with bile.
His Hellboy is going to be exactly like the tv version of Constantine (which he directed two episodes of): slavish devotion to nerdboy trivia from the source material but no effort towards actually translating the material to the screen. You’ll get all the cinematic references as they try to set up a new cinematic universe that will never launch.
OK but this is the only thing a new HELLBOY THE MOTION PICTURE was ever going to be so
It’s going to aggressively ape Marvel formula. Maybe Hellboy won’t act like he’s 14 if I’m lucky?! The action will still be bad but in an overcut anonymous Neil Marshall way instead of a stately del Toro way. Ron Perlman will tweet something snide because he’s a giant sixtysomething baby. The comics will still be the comics.