Hellboy: The Crooked Man—Is This Horror Gem Cursed, Delayed, or Just Ghosting Fans?
Added on September 12, 2025 inEntertainment News Cards, Movie News Cards
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Ever wonder what happens when a beloved comic book hellraiser gets dragged through the Hollywood mud—only to claw his way back from the ashes with a lighter purse but heavier grit? If Mercury’s mischievous dance through the shadowy realms of Scorpio today is any indication, maybe chaos really is the secret ingredient to creativity. Hellboy: The Crooked Man burst out of the cosmic studio straitjacket, stripping away blockbuster gloss to return to his darker, scarier roots—just in time for the film world’s own retrograde. When a franchise stumbles under the weight of big-budget expectations and creative clashes, can returning to basics save it—or doom it to burn in the bargain bin? From box office bombs and cut scripts to whispered AI rumors and a budget slice so thin, Hellboy might just need some lunar magic to survive this reincarnation. Buckle up, because this tale is as twisted and crooked as its titular demon—and I’m here to guide you through every blood-spattered frame. LEARN MORE
There are more than a few horror movie franchises that fans would love to see stripped free of their heavy Hollywood burdens and get back down to the scary (cough, Resident Evil). Get rid of the bells and whistles. The studio interference. The PG-13 ratings and generic storytelling. Well, today’s film did just that. Partly out of necessity after a box office bomb left them with no major studio to party with, and partly because the creator of a popular comic book character was ready to finally get his hands dirty and see the true version of the character he’d created come to life on the screen. No matter the obstacles. The many, many obstacles. This is the story of What Happened to Hellboy: The Crooked Man.
The first two Hellboy films were, at the very least, moderate success stories with fans and at the box office. Perhaps not enough of a success story, however, for the studio to greenlight an expensive vision for Guillermo Del Toro’s third Hellboy film. After more than a decade between films, Del Toro finally tweeted in February of 2017 that the sequel would “100% not happen” and that this would be the final word on the matter. So what’s a girl to do except completely reboot the franchise?
In 2019, the franchise rebooted with Lionsgate and the lovable David Harbour in the role. Sounds like a surefire hit, right? The film, boasting a $50 million budget, opened to only $12 million domestically on its way to a $55 million total haul. It was considered one of the biggest box office bombs of the year. The critics weren’t fans either, with one calling it “origin story gobbledygook,” another deeming it “soulless.” Finally, an audience CinemaScore of a “C” put the hopeful franchise starter on the canvas like Little Mac taking down Gabby Jay with a full power meter. And if you thought it was over, think again. The director and cast of Hellboy (2019) picked it back up off the canvas and kicked its ass a little more while the ref begged and pleaded WCW-style for them to stop.
Director Neil Marshall blamed the studio and producers for being too involved and called the script… and I’m quoting here… “shit,” saying that he couldn’t be expected to polish a turd. David Harbour lamented that fans of the Del Toro and Ron Perlman films likely never gave the film a fair shot from the get-go. It’s hard to imagine how a franchise could come back from all that. Then again, it was always hard to imagine a film about a comic book centered around a giant red half-demon baby summoned to Earth by Nazi occultists. Yet here we are.
So, the choice was made to strip Hellboy of all its fanciness. No more would Hollywood suits meddle in its makings. To be honest, there probably weren’t any studios willing to at this point. But that’s beside the point. Hellboy would go back to its beginnings, and please God, NO, NOT another origin story. It would go back to its creator, Mike Mignola. Mignola had been both involved and not involved in a myriad of ways with the three Hellboy films that came before The Crooked Man. When Del Toro helmed the franchise and told Mignola some parts of the character wouldn’t work on screen, he didn’t get in his way. Mignola was happy to let the visionary director put his stamp on his character. He did, in fact, write a script for 2019’s Hellboy. But not the one Neil Marshall lovingly referred to as “shit.” Mignola’s script was rewritten by Andrew Cosby before the studio rummaged around in there and, by the end of it, left it something he didn’t recognize. Safe to say, Mignola was happy to finally have a hands-on approach to his creation.
The first thing Mignola wanted to do was move away from the “superhero” moniker and towards the horror of the character. He wanted to move back to a time when the character was simpler. Not the beast of the apocalypse. Just a supernatural investigator trying to live his life. It would take us back to 1950s Appalachia, to a place where even the trees and the dirt felt haunted, where Hellboy would team up with a WWII veteran to face off against a demon called “The Crooked Man.”
There couldn’t have been a better time in the franchise for Mignola to tell this story. Even when he wrote the three-part comic miniseries for Dark Horse Comics in 2008, it was born out of his desire to take Hellboy back to a simpler place and to pull back and isolate the character from the globe-trotting, cosmic stories he’d become accustomed to. The story feels like something out of an A24 horror film, and budget-wise, that’s exactly what they’d need to go for.
Mignola armed himself with writer Christopher Golden (who had written Hellboy in his past as well) and writer/director Brian Taylor to get the script written. Taylor had previously written and directed Crank starring Jason Statham, which was a low-budget, over-the-top idea that was so batshit insane, it worked wonders for audiences. He’d also had some experience in adapting comic book movies with Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, for better or worse, making him the perfect man for the director chair.
In 2023, it was officially announced that Millennium Media, Nu Boyana Films, Dark Horse Entertainment, and Campbell Grobman Films would be producing a new Hellboy film. Hellboy: The Crooked Man would even be rated R and take the character back to his horror roots (as the last film had promised and failed to do). All that was left to do was cast Hellboy. Well, and you know… make the movie.
You may have noticed, of the studios listed above, there were no Lionsgate, Universal, or Warner Bros as part of this venture. The Crooked Man would boast a budget of only $20 million dollars, which is less than half of any Hellboy budget before it. There were never any A-list stars in consideration for the project, and that’s exactly what Mike Mignola wanted. This time around, the creators of the project were searching for a more stoic Hellboy that brought almost a quiet, Western presence to the role. 12 Strong actor Jack Kesy is the only known actor who was offered the role, and he fit it well. Not only did he have the physical specimen to bring the character to life in a realistic way, but his demeanor throughout did the character justice at this point in his career. Instead of feeling like a superhero story focused on our main character, The Crooked Man put the horrors of the woods at the forefront. Kesy would chime in at just the right time with a drag of smoke and a smart-ass line… but never seemed to overshadow the story. It did, in fact, feel more like a folk horror western than a superhero movie in the end. Even if this iteration of Hellboy isn’t the most beloved (we’ll get to that later), it certainly wasn’t because of the titular character’s performance.
Yellowstone actor Jefferson White was cast as one of Hellboy‘s adopted sidekicks and haunted WWII veteran Tom Ferrell. The character just kind of shows up, spits on the ground, and makes it known that he’s seen the devil and knows all about a bunch of witchy shit; but eventually divulges a backstory that fits our situation. Adeline Rudolph was cast as fellow BPRD Agent Bobbie Jo Song, who is accompanying Hellboyto transport a huge supernatural spider to their headquarters. When I say huge, I don’t mean the nickel-sized spider in my laundry room that sends my wife and kids screaming out of the house like Pennywise just floated out of the toilet….but legitimately huge. Like the size of a La-Z-Boy. Huge.
When the spider escapes, Hellboy and company end up in the middle of some woods straight out of Robert Eggers’ The Witch surrounded by backwoods folks using an invalid child as a floor rug. Then there’s a friendly witch, who leaves her naked body looking like a deflated Hot Pocket to shapeshift into a raccoon in the woods, and a mean witch who is gorgeous on the eyes but has the voice of someone who’s really just here to scope out the copper wire situation in your apartment. Good witch is played by newcomer actress Hannah Margetson, and the latter by Vikings actress Leah McNamara. All of our good, bad, and in-between forces face off at a church by film’s end, and that church is run by none other than the butler from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air himself, Joseph Marcell. That’s right! Geoffrey! F*ck making a bunch of sandwiches, he’s fighting demons in this one!
The two-and-a-half-month shoot took place in Bulgaria in 2023 and featured an impressive number of special effects shots. Though there was no hiding the need for computerized special effects in The Crooked Man, the film had a bevy of impressive moments visually and more than a few inspired moments overall. The goal here was to make this feel straight off the pages of the comic book, and in many ways, it succeeded. Gutsy editing choices, such as a random cut-in where a scary lady shows us how to make disgusting “witch balls” were a welcome innovation for this viewer.
Still, the production found themselves in hot water when an article out of the Berlinale Film Festival quoted the director as saying they used artificial intelligence to create many of their special effects after not being able to make the shots work practically. Folks were unhappy. It took director Brian Taylor heading to Twitter to clear the air, stating that the Millennium Films President was misquoted in the article and had actually been discussing his previous film, The Offering. The director promised that Hellboy: The Crooked Man had zero use of AI. Author’s note here: A look at the article featuring the quote makes this a very substantial claim, as the author of said article clearly assumed he was talking about Hellboy, when the man never said so. Also, both Hellboy and Martin Bassindale’s Crooked Man were 100% created using makeup and practical effects. Which is always welcome. Though someone working on production did take to Reddit to share some early photos and revealed that they were hopeful some things would be added in post that never were. Things such as Hellboy’s yellow eyes and The Crooked Man’s broken neck. Considering the director ended up having to create the opening credits himself on Photoshop and After Effects due to the project running out of money, one could conjure this was due to budget restraints.
The result of all this was kind of exactly what they’d set out to accomplish: a scaled-back, lower-budget, horror-fueled version of Hellboy with a kick-ass score by composer Sven Faulconer, who also worked on Scream VI alongside Brian Tyler. You know how in A24 folk horror movies it always sounds like there’s some guy behind the barn or in the woods playing a haunted violin? Sven nailed that shit. But regardless, it’s hard to deny the overall project could have really benefited from a little more budget.
Here’s where things get tricky, no matter how you feel about the quality of this latest iteration of Hellboy. The film was only released theatrically in a few international markets. Otherwise, it was distributed straight to video-on-demand by Ketchup Entertainment. Having your film released straight to video by a company named after a delicious food condiment makes it a bit difficult for it to leave its true mark. It would appear that the future of the Hellboy franchise post-The Crooked Man has as much to do with the failures of the 2019 reboot as it does anything else. That being said, the film wasn’t exactly beloved by critics either, sitting at a 36% “Rotten” on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes (though it does boast a 51% audience score).
Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a bit of a double-edged sword, as those accustomed to the previous films may have been looking for a different tone entirely. But after all, that’s exactly what Mike Mignola and team set out to do. As a standalone film, The Crooked Man was a nice mix of folk horror and comic book storytelling that this horror fan enjoyed. Sure, the budget and (at times) backwoods overacting make for a few awkward, clunky moments. But given the situation, count me in as someone who received a whole lot more than he bargained for from the film. Leaving at least some fans disappointed that the $2 million return on the $20 million project, paired with the lack of current excitement around the project, is unlikely to wield any follow-ups. But we’ll always have those woods in… wherever the fuck those woods were. And that, my friends, is What Happened to Hellboy: The Crooked Man.
A couple of the previous episodes of this show can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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