Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has “mixed feelings” about previous movies, but The Crooked Man is the comic-accurate take he always wanted.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man will serve as yet another reboot of the iconic paranormal investigator created by Mike Mignola. However, this serves as the first Hellboy movie that Mignola has been majorly involved in from the very beginning, and he told GamesRadar that although he has “mixed feelings” about the previous movies, he’s pretty pumped about The Crooked Man.
“So often, I would come in late on projects where somebody else had already put the pieces together in a way that didn’t quite fit,” Mignola said. “And this time, I got a chance to say, ‘We’re going to do The Crooked Man, we’re going to stick to that story.’ We need to add a little bit of backstory. So we borrowed it from one other story so we didn’t have to make up new stuff.“
Mignola continued, saying they tried to “stick as much as possible to The Crooked Man [comic], because not only is it my favourite story, it has most of my favourite Hellboy moments. So the idea of actually trying to get that stuff on screen was really exciting.” He also praised director Brian Taylor for pulling moments straight from the comic: “Almost every day was amazement of, ‘Oh my god that looks like that, this looks like this. Oh my god, they used the same angle for that shot.’ It really was that amazing thing of seeing your work brought to life.“
As for the previous Hellboy movies, Mignola said, “Every one of them has been a very different experience. But as somebody who’s had mixed feelings about the earlier films, the one lesson I learned is if I can get in at the very beginning, and at some point you know you’re gonna lose – I mean you never have control but you feel like you have control at the beginning and then you hope that somebody doesn’t take apart the thing you built. That happens.” Although the last Hellboy movie didn’t exactly impress critics, I’d say that Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy movies are quite beloved; that said, as the creator of the character, Mignola is perfectly within his rights to feel as though those movies didn’t quite capture what he wanted.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man will see “Hellboy and a rookie BPRD agent 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. In the comic, The Crooked Man was 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 film will be released later this year.