The Fatal Mistake Every Hellboy Movie Made (That Netflix Can Fix)

Even if they don't contribute to the climactic showdown, that kind of one-and-done monster-of-the-week adventure is the bread and butter (or, in culinary terms more fitting to the big red guy, the stack of pancakes and butter) of "from the pages of Hellboy" storytelling.

These are the places in which the "normal" of the BPRD is established and the characters have room to breathe and grow. That is something which inherently lends itself more to the episodic TV format than the big screen.

Part of the appeal of Hellboy and the BPRD lies in how their typical focus isn't cancelling the apocalypse. They are more a kind of blue-collar superhero. Paranormal investigation and monster fighting is just a job to them. Even when the BPRD comics did have the world ravaged by Lovecraftian monsters from beyond our universe - in the Hell On Earth arc - much of the regular storytelling was about the offbeat workaday world of being an anti-monster agency in a post-apocalyptic world trying to put itself back together.

That era also showed how engaging the BPRD world can be even without its down in Hell star (and that a BPRD TV series could work even without the headline name). The pages of Hellboy have a rich and weird supporting cast and that lack of breathing room in apocalypse-focused movies gives them short shrift. Strip away the whitewashing controversy and Daniel Dae Kim's appalling "British" accent and what else even is there to remember about the 2019 movie's version of Ben Daimio? (They didn't even include his wartime Japanese sorceress-spy grandmother and her masked monkey minions!).

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