What Happened Next? - 9 Planned Movie Sequels That Were Cancelled
6. Hellboy 3
Before its official cancellation in early 2017, Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy 3 had been struggling to get off the ground for almost a decade.
But because the sequel had been in the discussion for such a long time, plenty of information about its story has seeped out.
One of the earliest tidbits came from Del Toro in 2009, when he told IGN that the movie would be "bittersweet" "heartbreaking" and "the end of days. It would be very grand, operatic and quite tragic."
A few years later, the director took part in a Reddit AMA where he further expanded upon the plot that he envisioned (via ComingSoon):
"...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. He has to become the beast of the Apocalypse to be able to defend humanity, but at the same time he becomes a much darker being."
In 2015, former Hellboy actor Ron Perlman chimed in too, relaying Del Toro's detailed plans for the never-to-be threequel while talking to Empire:
Holy sh*t, he’s the beast of the Apocalypse. He has to take down civilization. He has to. It’s non-negotiable. That’s the foundation for the story, and that’s why I think it would be a shame if we don’t do it.
He then added that Hellboy's kids would be involved:
The two twins: one would look like the mum and one would look like the dad. And one of them was going to be completely f*****g corrupt, the other one angelic. Which one was which? Only Guillermo would make the f****d-up-looking one be the angel. So then that adds to the saga.
Hellboy 3 seems like it would have been the darkest movie in the trilogy by some margin, and it looks like Del Toro was intent on giving the character a definitive, tearjerking ending - possibly by killing him off. Sadly, we'll never know for sure.