By After years of endless trying and never giving up, Guillermo del Toro finally gave up on making Hellboy 3 a reality. On a recent Reddit AMA, del Toro admitted the film wasn’t happening due to a lack of a studio backing:
[W]e have gone through basically every studio and asked for financing, and they are not interested. 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. 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.
Basically, Hellboy is a great cult film, but cult films aren’t affordable anymore. In this day and age, everything needs to make money or the studios bleed themselves to death. At least del Toro gave us his idea for the third film, where Hellboy becomes a beast of the apocalypse:
…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.
It sounds so cool. Sigh.
[via /Film]