Hellboy Is Being Rebooted Again as Hellboy: The Crooked Man

Millennium Media has announced that Hellboy is being rebooted once again in a new movie called Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and it looks to expand the world of the character “through one of the most beloved issues of the comic series.”

As reported by Deadline, Crank director Brian Taylor will be helming the new film and, perhaps most exciting for fans, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has written the script alongside Chris Golden. This will be the first time Mignola has written a script for a Hellboy movie.

The Hellboy: The Crooked Man comic was released in July 2008 alongside Hellboy II: The Golden Army and finds Hellboy teaming up with a rookie from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense after they get “stranded in 1950s rural Appalachia. There, they discover a small community haunted by witches, led by a local devil with a troubling connection to Hellboy’s past: the Crooked Man.”

For those who wish to know more about The Crooked Man, he was, at least in the comics, an “eighteenth-century miser and war profiteer named Jeremiah Witkins who was hanged for his crimes yet returned from Hell as the region’s resident Devil.”

“The Crooked Man is a departure from all previous Hellboy films where Mike Mignola and the creator of the comics will finally shepherd an authentic version of his stories and characters in film form,” said Millennium Media’s President Jeffrey Greenstein who is at the EFM in Berlin talking to potential distributors about the project. “This is the first in the series of films that will captivate audiences in familiar (and new) ways. Brian Taylor is an expert across the board, and I couldn’t think of a better person to bring this story to life to show our audience this different and original Hellboy slate of films.”

Hellboy’s last trip to the big screen was in 2019 with David Harbour taking on the iconic role. In our Hellboy review, we said, “Hellboy returns in this unholy mess of a reboot, which is marred by terrible CGI and a poorly executed story.”

Ron Perlman starred in 2004’s Hellboy and 2008’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and he has said he would be up to making Hellboy 3 even though he claims he’s too old. Hellboy 3 could have brought Perlman and director Guillermo del Toro back together one more time, but it never came to be.

For more, check out the details on the upcoming Hellboy Web of Wyrd game, and why we think Dark Horse’s Hellboy Saga is an unprecedented accomplishment.

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.