Hellboy: Rise Of The Blood Queen - 8 Things It Must Do Differently From Del Toro's Films

A more faithful adaptation with a hard 'R' rating? Yes please.

by Ewan Paterson
Close Up Of Hellboy Face Comic
Dark Horse

Well, it's official; Hellboy's getting his reboot and Stranger Things' David Harbour is set for the lead role. It's certainly bittersweet, considering the public fashion in which Guillmero del Toro's Hellboy III imploded, but it was time to pass down the mantle to a different team. One that will, according to Mike Mignola, offer a much darker and more authentic take on the character.

Not even del Toro's biggest fans will deny the amount of talent attached to this reboot (now titled, Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen), with both Harbour and director Neil Marshall having been involved in plenty of recent successes - the former most famously for his role in Netflix's eighties horror romp, Stranger Things, and the latter for his work on The Descent and Game of Thrones respectively.

Given who’s involved, and - more notably - the source material itself, it’s more than apparent that we’ll be looking at a darker and more suitably horrific Hellboy adaptation than what’s been released in the past. And, while we may have all enjoyed del Toro’s vision, it is true that Hellboy has always been a gothic icon, with Mignola’s work on both Hellboy and B.P.R.D. branching together both the superhero and horror genres on the page. Who better to translate that than someone who loves horror?

With a tentative 2018 release date in mind, it’s clear that Rise of the Blood Queen is going to be a very different (albeit faithful) kind of comic book film. Ol' Red is in for a treat indeed.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.