Hellboy: 10 Flaws That Prove Hellboy 3 Would've Been Better
3. It's Afraid To Be As Dark As It Wants
For all the gore accompanying Hellboy's brief moments as a horned bringer of doom in the reboot, the carnage is fairly short-lived. Daddy shows up to share some encouraging words, Hellboy breaks off his horns, and that's it. Take away the bloody action and giant monsters (which are only briefly seen), and it's basically what happens at the end of del Toro's first Hellboy movie.
The closest we get to a real apocalypse is a brief vision of Hellboy riding a dragon and slaying some badly animated victims with a flaming Excalibur. It's a shame, because this scene feels so much like a live-action take on Heavy Metal that it's impossible not to imagine what a full-blown apocalypse might look like. If we'd gotten Hellboy 3, we might actually know the answer.
Del Toro indicated that Hellboy 3 would, to some extent, involve Hellboy coming to grips with his destiny and bringing about the end of days. It's not clear if this means Hellboy would have been the villain of his own movie, as del Toro stated in a Reddit AMA that there would be at least one other villain for Hellboy to defeat while telling IGN that the results would be tragic. In the comics, Hellboy's attempt to stave off the apocalypse resulted in his death, and that might very well have been del Toro's plan. On the other hand, his willingness to diverge from source material indicates that we could have possibly spent more time with Hellboy's evil side.
Regardless of whether Hellboy would have ultimately given in to his demonic calling, the strong implication is that Hellboy 3 would have focused much more on the apocalypse than the reboot or either of del Toro's first two Hellboy films. It's odd, for a reboot this in-your-face about its violence, that they were afraid to show more of the apocalypse than they did.