# Hellboy is being rebooted, Ron Perlman isn't coming back.



## KnightBrolaire (May 8, 2017)

http://bloody-disgusting.com/comics/3436184/neill-marshall-directing-r-rated-hellboy-reboot/

Neil Marshall (directed a ton of Game of Thrones episodes,The Descent, Dog Soldiers, Doomsday, etc) is attached to direct. 
The sheriff in Stranger Things (David Harbour) is going to play Hellboy.


----------



## flint757 (May 8, 2017)

Can't say I'm surprised. He's kind of up there in age.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 8, 2017)

flint757 said:


> Can't say I'm surprised. He's kind of up there in age.



yep, he's 67, way too old to keep him as hellboy.


----------



## 7 Strings of Hate (May 9, 2017)

I love Hellboy. I'm down, but Ron was SOOOOOO good as Hellboy.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 9, 2017)

7 Strings of Hate said:


> I love Hellboy. I'm down, but Ron was SOOOOOO good as Hellboy.



i know, harbour has his work cut out for him trying to fill those shoes.


----------



## astrocreep (May 9, 2017)

Neil Marshall is amazing, but that's still blasphemy!


----------



## chopeth (May 9, 2017)

no, c'mon! stop doing that!!


----------



## wankerness (May 9, 2017)

Stupid. If GDT isn't connected, there's no point. Just do something else (preferably something original). Neil Marshall is GREAT at really gritty, violent things on a budget (ex Centurion, Dog Soldiers, The Descent, the big GOT episodes he did), not movies with likable, warm characters with massive budgets. This just sounds like a terrible idea.

I rewatched Hellboy 1/2 last week. 2 is my vote for single best "superhero" movie. Especially from a visual sense. It's possibly the most arty-looking "blockbuster" of all time.

It's surprising to me that Hellboy 1 doesn't get more credit for influencing Marvel flicks (it predates Iron Man by years). It really has all their strengths and all of their weaknesses. The best scenes are all just the heroes hanging out, it has really vivid characters, tons of great humor, and the villain is totally forgettable. It also ends with a frickin Sky Portal that will destroy the world, like pretty much everything from the last five years. Plus, lots of repetitive CGI drones that the heroes have to fight.


----------



## bostjan (May 9, 2017)

I'm so sick of these reboots and remakes. Hollywood is floundering, but people are eating this garbage up left and right, so they keep going deeper and deeper with the reboots and remakes. Someone might come along and do something halfway original, but Hollywood will just reboot it two years later if it's a success.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 9, 2017)

bostjan said:


> I'm so sick of these reboots and remakes. Hollywood is floundering, but people are eating this garbage up left and right, so they keep going deeper and deeper with the reboots and remakes. Someone might come along and do something halfway original, but Hollywood will just reboot it two years later if it's a success.



hopefully they don't feel the need to rehash the origin story like they did with batman (I don't need to see his parents get shot EVERY FVCKING MOVIE) or Spiderman or Superman. I always hoped that when Hellboy did well people would want to make movies about other cool heroes/antiheroes like Lobo or Grendel or hell, even Agent Venom. Maybe the studio execs finally realize there's a solid market for r-rated superhero films and cool stories like Lobo or Grendel's can get on screen now.


----------



## bostjan (May 9, 2017)

I blame George Lucas. Just make the damn movie, then let it alone. I don't need to see Jabba the Hut where he doesn't belong or get a completely new movie to get rid of subtitles. And, as much as I like _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_, I don't need to see it reshot with more T&A in 3D or updated sound effects.


----------



## Xaios (May 9, 2017)

wankerness said:


> Stupid. If GDT isn't connected, there's no point. Just do something else (preferably something original). Neil Marshall is GREAT at really gritty, violent things on a budget (ex Centurion, Dog Soldiers, The Descent, the big GOT episodes he did), not movies with likable, warm characters with massive budgets. This just sounds like a terrible idea.



My thoughts exactly. I hope it works for them, but Neil Marshall has never displayed any penchant for directing "fun and laid back" (at least not from the stuff I've seen anyway, I'll admit I haven't seen his whole body of work). Action? Yes, but of the visceral, ultra-violent type, not necessarily the kinetic style that is dictated by comic book movies.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 9, 2017)

Xaios said:


> My thoughts exactly. I hope it works for them, but Neil Marshall has never displayed any penchant for directing "fun and laid back" (at least not from the stuff I've seen anyway, I'll admit I haven't seen his whole body of work). Action? Yes, but of the visceral, ultra-violent type, not necessarily the kinetic style that is dictated by comic book movies.



Doomsday is about as funny as his films get and it's more of a mad-max esque dark humor. I think he'll do just fine, the real question is who's penning the script...


----------



## Beefmuffin (May 9, 2017)

Doesn't matter if it sucks, we will just get another version from another director 5-10 years later. Maybe it will release the same time the 7th version of spider man comes out. Seriously......wtf is going on.


----------



## wankerness (May 9, 2017)

I doubt they'll keep rebooting this, as the first two weren't particularly profitable. It isn't like Spiderman or X-Men. I'm really surprised they're even trying this first time.


----------



## chopeth (May 10, 2017)

Nah, the first was way better than the second. I have a very good memory of watching that film in university, in a cinema course and Hellboy was the film which perfectly epitomized the transposition from a comic to the screen, how the colours are setting the mood, the camera work from different perspectives to enhance feelings, I learned a lot from that movie, it was something like 15 years ago, there weren't as many comic films as today. The second is a bit meh compared with that one.


----------



## wankerness (May 10, 2017)

chopeth said:


> Nah, the first was way better than the second. I have a very good memory of watching that film in university, in a cinema course and Hellboy was the film which perfectly epitomized the transposition from a comic to the screen, how the colours are setting the mood, the camera work from different perspectives to enhance feelings, I learned a lot from that movie, it was something like 15 years ago, there weren't as many comic films as today. The second is a bit meh compared with that one.



The first definitely isn't bad, but the visual design in the second is light-years beyond it. My guess is that since you got a big analysis of the first and not the second, you're now trained to recognize everything good in there and the second you haven't been trained to. Coming in blind to both, I think you'd see that the second is a visual feast in comparison. The only thing I think is worse in it at all is that Selma Blair is even more miscast in it (in the first she's supposed to be depressed and comes off as comatose, in the second she's supposed to be crabby and comes off as comatose).

From what I've seen from comics fans, they tend to dislike the second much more than the first as it's further away from the comics and more like "GDT putting his sketchbook on the screen," but as I've never even seen a page of the comics, it sure didn't bug me. The second has MUCH more elaborate visuals and the villain is actually interesting, plus it has the incredible Barry Manilow scene.

Man, I wish this site had collapsing spoiler tags instead of green highlight ones. Here's what I wrote about Hellboy 1/2 last week, but it's pretty lengthy. 

*Hellboy 1 - 6/10*

This was like a prototype for the Marvel movies. There are really likable, vivid heroes whose interactions are great to watch, and there are plenty of jokes that land and even some pathos that work. But, there is a main villain who's almost completely forgettable who's got some vague plot full of macguffins and massively over-scaled climax with a SKY BEAM/PORTAL that's going to cause the end of the whole world, which has become a huge cliche over the last ten years and really started pissing everyone off after Suicide Squad. Plus, there are replicating identical CGI monsters that work as PG-13 fodder for our heroes (see also: Avengers 1, Avengers 2, Thor 2, Suicide Squad, etc).

The aforementioned replicating CGI monsters at least start off appearing one at a time, and the movie clearly made every attempt to have them practical whenever possible. They look like some kind of tentacle-faced apes, and I think they look really stupid, but oh well.

Most of the characters look great, particularly the bizarre gasmasked assassin guy with the clockwork key that he has to wind up before going on blade whirling sprees. The group of heroes either seems too small or too random, but those that exist are still likable. Ron Pearlman Hellboy himself is justly adored, though I don't know if they should have specified that "he's the equivalent of 20 years old." Abe the psychically attuned fish man is bizarre yet adorable, and the effects they used on him are again largely practical and still hold up as a result. Liz, the very emotionally shaky fire-lady, unfortunately had her arc stolen by FIRE HELL MAN or whatever his name is in suicide squad, but if you haven't seen that she's pretty good. Her character is definitely underdeveloped, but Selma Blair has such a great look (she looks like a really shaky version of Aubrey Plaza instead of a combative, bored, sarcastic one) that the character feels a lot deeper than it maybe was written.

The bad guy is Rasputin, apparently, and his nazi girlfriend (I missed the part that explained why she hadn't aged since the 40s, though I know it was in there). They basically just suck. It's hard to put a bead on why, but at no point did I care what they were doing or really understand his motivation for wanting to open a portal to hell and have huge Lovecraftian demons come and wipe out humanity. Ah well.

The action scenes are mostly fun, if obviously much smaller scale than scene in the later Marvel films. Again, I was sort of annoyed that they kept fighting the same stupid-looking tentacle apes, but oh well. The real strength of the movie is in the interpersonal relationships and in the goofy scenes like Hellboy spying on Liz and his FBI "handler's" date while talking to an admiring 9 year old on the rooftop. Much like some of the later Marvel movies. I'm surprised this never seems to come up when discussing them, it seems like MUCH more of an influence than any of the other precursors like the X-Men movies.

*Hellboy 2 - 9/10*

A peeved elf decides to retake earth from the humans, who broke their treaty from millennia ago to keep out of the forests. His twin, physically and psychically linked sister does not feel very good about this, and comes to Hellboy and co to stop him from reactivating the golden army, made up of indestructible clockwork golems.

From an artistic point of view, this might be the best-looking big-budget CGI film of all time. The visual invention is off the charts. It's relentless, too, with one set-piece after another. The visual highlight from a spectacle sense is probably the climax, which despite being the heroes fighting an army of interchangeable CGI minions which also happen to be big robots REALLY works and is the only example of either of those tiresome tropes that really does it right. However, the most impressive visuals are possibly just some of the gorgeous sets, particularly the fading underground home of the elves, and the intricate rooms that the princess takes refuge in within the troll market. I have a fondness for the scene with the gigantic lima bean monster which has a death scene that's unexpectedly poignant, and suggests Guillermo Del Toro was also familiar with those deleted scenes from Godzilla Vs Biollante and wanted to execute the idea properly!! There are a few such scenes here which are truly beautiful, and Danny Elfman&#8217;s score rises to the occasion.

The introduction to the movie is another high point, and I feel like I've seen it ripped off in another recent blockbuster, but I might be wrong. The only specific things that come to mind are the handful of extremely stylized partially static cutscenes in Dragon Age 2 (some early backstory and the ending FMVs) and World of Warcraft (the Illidan scenes in Legion). It's a very stylized sequence explaining the history of the elves and humans, and depicting the Golden Army. It almost looks like stop motion, with the races and robots all depicted as crude puppets, saving the reveals for later.

The elves have a great look here, diverging strongly from the usual &#8220;impossibly beautiful tall people with pointy ears and long hair.&#8221; Here, they have that general outline, but have deathly white skin, reddish eyes, no eyebrows, pinpoint pupils, white hair, and some kind of scarification on their faces. They end up looking more like particularly sickly vampire elves. There are plenty of other critters here, with the troll market alone having about as many varieties as Jabba&#8217;s palace, but other memorable monsters are all over the place. The most striking one is likely the angel of death seen towards the end, with ratty bird wings covered with eyeballs and a huge bone ridge in place of eyes.

There&#8217;s a plot thread about Hellboy&#8217;s about siding with the creatures instead of the humans, and it seems the filmmakers sided with the former. The imagination on display here is unparalleled. The only other recent blockbusters I can think of that even come close are Avatar (some great fauna, but not nearly as fun overall, and the stupid blue Navi feel way too compromised to ensure maximum audience horniness) and Guardians of the Galaxy (great visuals, tons of color, but way too many aliens are just &#8220;people that are some other color and maybe with some antennae&#8221.

From a character/plot standpoint, this one works a lot better than the previous. It&#8217;s much more focused, with basically all events focused entirely on the elf prince&#8217;s goal of destroying the world. Most of the subplots come directly from this, most amusingly Abe&#8217;s awkward infatuation with the elf princess (and the wonderful resulting scene in which he and Hellboy get drunk and sing along with Barry Manilow&#8217;s &#8220;Can&#8217;t Smile Without You&#8221. There&#8217;s one major new non-elf character, which is a German gas cloud in a steampunk suit who is hired to oversee the squad after too many infractions. He&#8217;s unfortunately voiced by Seth McFarlane, but it&#8217;s not distracting.

It&#8217;s not flawless, of course. The entire subplot with Hellboy and Liz&#8217;s romantic problems falls flat, partly due to Selma Blair not being nearly as good as this frustrated, confident version of Liz. There are two terrible non-diegetic rock music cues which stick out like sore thumbs. Other than that, though, it&#8217;s about as good as it possibly could be. What it lacks in emotional depth, it more than makes up for in the massive overachievement in visual spectacle. This is easily one of the best-looking films of the century so far.


----------



## fps (May 10, 2017)

Hellboy 3 is the great film that never got made. No idea how that didn't happen, I mourn that it didn't happen. Especially since I'm not generally a fan of comic book movies and most of them have been utter cack.


----------



## chopeth (May 10, 2017)

wankerness said:


> The first definitely isn't bad, but the visual design in the second is light-years beyond it. My guess is that since you got a big analysis of the first and not the second, you're now trained to recognize everything good in there and the second you haven't been trained to. Coming in blind to both, I think you'd see that the second is a visual feast in comparison. The only thing I think is worse in it at all is that Selma Blair is even more miscast in it (in the first she's supposed to be depressed and comes off as comatose, in the second she's supposed to be crabby and comes off as comatose).
> 
> From what I've seen from comics fans, they tend to dislike the second much more than the first as it's further away from the comics and more like "GDT putting his sketchbook on the screen," but as I've never even seen a page of the comics, it sure didn't bug me. The second has MUCH more elaborate visuals and the villain is actually interesting, plus it has the incredible Barry Manilow scene.
> 
> ...



I think the second is better visually in your opinion because the first one purposefully didn't pay so much attention to it, trying to depict an approach more focused on introducing the character, the plot and showing rawness as a director aesthetic interest. Just my opinion though, I didn't see it blindly, I was able to transpose that "training" with the one to other films in general, as we analized 12 films of different styles in the course I mentioned.


----------



## wankerness (May 10, 2017)

chopeth said:


> I think the second is better visually in your opinion because the first one purposefully didn't pay so much attention to it, trying to depict an approach more focused on introducing the character, the plot and showing rawness as a director aesthetic interest. Just my opinion though, I didn't see it blindly, I was able to transpose that "training" with the one to other films in general, as we *analized* 12 films of different styles in the course I mentioned.



Bad typo!


----------



## MFB (May 10, 2017)

wankerness said:


> Bad typo!



What did you think the hole in the DVD was for?


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 10, 2017)

http://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3436596/hellboy-reboot-will-dark-gruesome-horror-movie/
Marshall is saying that the reboot is going to be a hard r-rated horror film.


----------



## chopeth (May 11, 2017)

wankerness said:


> Bad typo!



No idea what you mean, wanker, remember English is not my first language.


----------



## Dcm81 (May 11, 2017)

I don't get it.......Del Toro and Pearlman have said they wanted to make a third installment for donkey's years now but no studio wanted to invest because the first 2 weren't commercially successful enough.
Now a studio is investing and they just bypass those 2......seriously, WTF?!?


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 11, 2017)

chopeth said:


> No idea what you mean, wanker, remember English is not my first language.



analize instead of analyze. one makes people think of butt sex and the other doesn't.


----------



## chopeth (May 11, 2017)

KnightBrolaire said:


> analize instead of analyze. one makes people think of butt sex and the other doesn't.



really?  young minds, in my language you can do it too if you take the effort to think in that sense instead of a cognitive interpretation, obviously.


----------



## wankerness (May 11, 2017)

chopeth said:


> No idea what you mean, wanker, remember English is not my first language.



Oh, I thought it was, given your english is twice as good as many of the posters from english-speaking countries.

It's just a funny near-pun. Analyze is a word, the other is like, a constructed verb that would imply "DO ANAL TO"  Mainly only depraved nerds would read it that way, and everyone normal would just think you made a spelling error. Though, if you google search "analize," check out the results you get for porno movies!  There is actually one from 2004 which is called "Analize this" and is a porno parody of "analyze this"!


----------



## bostjan (May 11, 2017)

English is a weird language. Too many polite words are the same or similar to impolite words. I guess other languages do that as well, but the fact that English is such an odd mixture of oversimplification and overly complex rules, just makes it worse.

But I agree that Hollywood is going to likely analize this movie really hard. The end result might be a wreck, or it might be a popcorn flick, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's not going to end up being what I would consider a worthwhile piece of cinematic art. 

I was a huge fan of Del Toro. Chronos, the Devil's Backbone, and Pan's Labyrinth are three of my top twenty favourite films. Hellboy is up there, too. I even thought Pacific Rim was way better than critics said... and I love the Strain. I'm not sure what happened with the Hobbit, but, well, other than trying to fit 300 pounds of .... in a ten pound bag, I thought it was done quite well. Expectations after the LotR trilogy were set fairly high, and Del Toro really didn't have that much control in the end.

Anyway... I think Ron Perlman could still pull off Hellboy in 2017, or 2018...but probably not much after that. The first film was what, 11 or 12 years ago now? But the idea of a "reboot" is lost on me. But then again, I'm sooo sick of "reboots" in general. [rant]Now I have to refer to every damned film by the title and the year it came out. It was confusing enough when I was a kid and they reshot _Night of the Living Dead_ in colour and completely changed the ending, missing out on the entire artistic point of the film. But nowadays, the big movie studios are doing it on a monthly basis.

My question is "does this film _need_ to be remade?" If there's nothing new to say, and they just want to put whichever flavour-of-the-moment actor's face on the film and update the CGI, there's no point. Because, by the time the film comes out on DVD or bluray or is on HBO or Netflix or whatever, the actor is going to be less relevant and the CGI is going to be dated once again. It's like running out and buying an entire new computer every time they come out with a new graphics card. It's trendy and excessive and dumb.

Hollywood just doesn't want to admit that they are a bunch of stuffy old men who are afraid of new ideas, and we, the consumers, are too easily distracted by explosions and boobs to tell them that we won't excuse their laziness.[/rant]

So...I get their number. _Let the Right One In_ was an awesome movie. It had so much going on in it, that you could watch it three times and still have something to think about. Immediately after it came out, production started up on _Let Me In_, the same movie, but set in the good ole USA and starring Chloe Grace Moretz and with several times the budget. I felt the remake missed a lot of what the original did, and didn't really have new nuances to replace the complexity. They couldn't even capture the spirit of the name with the new name. It wasn't a bad flick, but it was just gratuitous. Most folks I know who saw both and had anything good to say about the second one were focused on the pesky subtitles in the original....

So...this could go a lot of different ways. Maybe Hellboy (2019) will have something new to say. But...more likely it will merely try to capitalize on the recent trend in vapid scripting and playing on nostalgia for old things that were cool years ago, with a little bit of explosions and a small PG-13 sized side of T&A.


----------



## wankerness (May 11, 2017)

Let Me In had a few improved aspects - the scene with the car crash is GREAT and is not drawn from anything in the original, there are no CGI cats, and I like the (possibly too blunt) parallels between the old dude and Oscar (or whatever he's called in the remake). That caretaker character is more sad than the original, where he still carries tinges of the source material, where he turned into a zombie with a boner that was trying to rape Eli for the rest of the story (no joke!!). It also looked good. The original is in my top 3 favorite movies, which all alternate depending on my mood, but I REALLY liked the remake when I saw it. I haven't watched it again since, though, so maybe it doesn't hold up. I saw some of one of the scenes on TV and was pretty annoyed by the CGI monster-girl effects with Chloe Moretz jumping around, and I did hate that they


Spoiler



made her a girl


 and thought that destroyed one of the main ideas of the original.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 11, 2017)

bostjan said:


> English is a weird language. Too many polite words are the same or similar to impolite words. I guess other languages do that as well, but the fact that English is such an odd mixture of oversimplification and overly complex rules, just makes it worse.
> 
> But I agree that Hollywood is going to likely analize this movie really hard. The end result might be a wreck, or it might be a popcorn flick, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's not going to end up being what I would consider a worthwhile piece of cinematic art.
> 
> ...


According to neil marshall the film is going to be r-rated, focusing on the action/horror elements from the comics and downplaying the whole snarky buddy cop vibe of the 1st movie. 
I will say that Let The Right One In is excellent and the american version infuriates me largely due to how it apes so many of the shots. There are parts where it's exactly the same, shot for shot. I felt it never nailed the camraderie that eli and oscar had in the original. The kids had way better chemistry in that version. Same thing with Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I greatly preferred the original. Fisher's version nails the darkness of the premise but doesn't really improve on it as far as I'm concerned.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 11, 2017)

wankerness said:


> Let Me In had a few improved aspects - the scene with the car crash is GREAT and is not drawn from anything in the original, there are no CGI cats, and I like the (possibly too blunt) parallels between the old dude and Oscar (or whatever he's called in the remake). That caretaker character is more sad than the original, where he still carries tinges of the source material, where he turned into a zombie with a boner that was trying to rape Eli for the rest of the story (no joke!!). It also looked good. The original is in my top 3 favorite movies, which all alternate depending on my mood, but I REALLY liked the remake when I saw it. I haven't watched it again since, though, so maybe it doesn't hold up. I saw some of one of the scenes on TV and was pretty annoyed by the CGI monster-girl effects with Chloe Moretz jumping around, and I did hate that they
> 
> 
> Spoiler
> ...



That's one of my problems with the american version, it loses the subtlety of the original. I liked that Eli was androgynous and it was hard to tell if she was actually a girl, same with the subtext between her and the caretaker. The crappy CGI only cemented my hate for it, it was completely unnecessary.


----------



## flint757 (May 11, 2017)

Del Toro didn't do the Hobbit. He was supposed to, but left the project like 2 years into pre-production and they were forced to start over because of it. Peter Jackson ended up doing everything himself with only like 3 months of pre-production left just so his New Zealand production crew wouldn't get laid off. The behind the scenes make you really hate the way Hollywood is run these days for that trilogy (only intended to be a 2-part initially, hence why the 3rd felt drawn out).

Any failures of those films can be blamed on a set release date BEFORE the films even started shooting.


----------



## chopeth (May 12, 2017)

oh, man, I'll never make that spelling mistake again


----------



## bostjan (May 12, 2017)

I rather enjoyed the original film trilogy starting with _The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo_, and I was immediately skeptical about a big budget remake. But I rented it out of a RedBox for a buck anyway. I almost turned it off during the opening credits, since it seemed so...hmm, I don't know the word for it. I guess it strongly came off as trying too hard to be everything it was not intended to be. Overall, the remake film wasn't ultimately as bad as I thought it was going to be, but still completely unnecessary.

The Hobbit would have been much better as a two-part series, IMO. Your comment about how Hollywood is run these days really resonates with me. It seems like 99.9% of the work done there is so contrived. I miss when a film was just a film, not the opening act for a trilogy. Just make the damned film, and make it a good film. If people like it, then worry about the sequel. If people like the sequel, then make it a trilogy. If your film is based on a book, and you title the film the same or basically the same as the book, then stick to the spirit of the source material. Don't make a thriller book into a comedy movie, etc. Also, if you can't think of any books to film, nor any original ideas, stop turning films that came out last year into new films to come out next year. I just don't get why people pay $14 to go to a theater to see a movie that is a remake of a movie they didn't go see two years prior.

And, for the love of god, if a movie has a cult following, don't reboot it. Just don't do it. It's a money grab and everybody knows it is. Take, _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_, it certainly has a strong cult following, and it's respected by some for its unconventional themes. So why remake the film? I dunno, it doesn't seem like it needs to be remade, yet... it was, in 1995, and then again in 2003, and then again in 2006, and then again in 2013. WTF?

I feel silly for already hating Hellboy reboot, but it's a film with a cult following that did a lot of things that were unconventional at the time, and ended up having a huge impact influencing films since then. How can any remake live up to that?!


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 12, 2017)

bostjan said:


> I rather enjoyed the original film trilogy starting with _The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo_, and I was immediately skeptical about a big budget remake. But I rented it out of a RedBox for a buck anyway. I almost turned it off during the opening credits, since it seemed so...hmm, I don't know the word for it. I guess it strongly came off as trying too hard to be everything it was not intended to be. Overall, the remake film wasn't ultimately as bad as I thought it was going to be, but still completely unnecessary.
> 
> The Hobbit would have been much better as a two-part series, IMO. Your comment about how Hollywood is run these days really resonates with me. It seems like 99.9% of the work done there is so contrived. I miss when a film was just a film, not the opening act for a trilogy. Just make the damned film, and make it a good film. If people like it, then worry about the sequel. If people like the sequel, then make it a trilogy. If your film is based on a book, and you title the film the same or basically the same as the book, then stick to the spirit of the source material. Don't make a thriller book into a comedy movie, etc. Also, if you can't think of any books to film, nor any original ideas, stop turning films that came out last year into new films to come out next year. I just don't get why people pay $14 to go to a theater to see a movie that is a remake of a movie they didn't go see two years prior.
> 
> ...



Comics reboot all the time, movies are just doing the same thing. Reboots/remakes have been made by hollywood since they started making movies, it's just that they seem to be exceptionally prevalent within the last 17 years. Sometimes reboots are better than the original. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre's case though, I'd argue that all the remakes are terrible and somehow lack the disturbing qualities of the original (seriously watch the scene where they pick up the hitchhiker and he starts cutting himself, it's intense). Martyrs (a french horror film) is a great and disturbing film but the american remake is terrible. There are plenty of good remakes though. Cape Fear is a good example, the original was made in 1962, then a remake in 1991 and it was better than the original. Same with The Fly or The Thing, they were remakes/reboots and are superior to the originals imo. Same with Scarface and Insomnia (Robin williams was creepy af in that and Photo booth).
At least they're trying to go a different direction with this iteration of hellboy and not try to make a carbon copy of the original. That's part of why I hated Let Me In and the american version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, they didn't really add anything substantial or original to the premises.


----------



## bostjan (May 12, 2017)

A comic that comes out once a month or similar is more understandable. It's like a television show. And, for whatever reasons (I think we can both guess the same thing), when they remake a 30 year old movie, my reaction to hearing about it is totally different than when I hear about a remake of a three year old movie.

_The Thing_ is a weird situation where someone decided to film a prequel to the original and give it the same title.  The two films almost seamlessly tie together, though.

Another example that's excusable is Batman. There were the original Batman films, which are pretty much forgotten. I've only seen bits and pieces of them on youtube. When Adam West came along to be Batman, it was for a television programme, which was successful, and ended up becoming a movie. That totally makes sense. Then, many years later, Tim Burton wanted to make a grittier darker Batman movie. There was a purpose behind it and the film was good. As those sequels went on into silliness, and people attached to the first film of the series were no longer even tangentially involved, and no one really wanted to be involved in continuing, well, it made sense to reboot, and _Batman Begins_ was good. Now that Nolan is no longer interested in doing Batman movies, it makes sense to do it again, if they come up with a good piece of source material.

Hellboy has less source material from which to draw, has a film-maker still interested in finishing a third installment, and has fewer tie-ins with other material than Batman.

IDK, hopefully I'm wrong, but "rebooting" Hellboy at this point in time seems cheap, to me.

The age of the original, how well known it is, how much of a cult following it has, what ideas the new team has to make an interesting films, etc., all factor into how a remake will come off.

TCM was a mistake to reboot, in every case, IMO. Even though it was an aging film, and not that widely known, it has a huge cult following and the remakes just didn't have enough originality to stand out.

The Fly was pretty old when it was remade, and the original didn't really have a big following. It was well known to fans of old drive-in thrillers, but not to the general public. The film makers also came up with a lot of ways to make the newer film unique and interesting on its own.

Now _Scarface_ is generally considered a remake of the 1932 film with the same name, but, hmm, well, they have *a lot* in common, but the details are all completely different: the ethnicities of the characters, the location, the time period, the political stuff going on in the background of everything and how it mingles with the plot...but all of these elements are almost mirror images...so, well, IDK, it's an interesting film and I thought they did a good job making an interesting film that recycled a lot from the original but is almost a completely different film. Plus, it was fifty years between them.


----------



## flint757 (May 12, 2017)

The Thing Prequel was such a missed opportunity. I'm a big FX guy and I watched all of the behind the scene stuff for the practical effects, of which the original is legendary for as well. The studio cut ALL of it out because they thought they'd have to build a CGI version anyhow to fix holes in the plot, so they figured they'd just only use CGI (no faith in the film, and only looking out for the profit margin). So they moved all of the pre-production budget to the post-production and you get something that totally missed the point of the original in the process. The practical effects looked amazing and definitely looked far superior to the video game quality CGI we ended up with in the end. Yet another reason why I hate Hollywood.


----------



## KnightBrolaire (May 12, 2017)

bostjan said:


> A comic that comes out once a month or similar is more understandable. It's like a television show. And, for whatever reasons (I think we can both guess the same thing), when they remake a 30 year old movie, my reaction to hearing about it is totally different than when I hear about a remake of a three year old movie.
> 
> _The Thing_ is a weird situation where someone decided to film a prequel to the original and give it the same title.  The two films almost seamlessly tie together, though.
> 
> ...


Personally I find the amount of time between remaking a film irrelevant, all that matters is if they do something different enough to make it worth watching. 
I have hope that Marshall will deliver something very different to what Del Toro did. He's sticking in his wheelhouse by making it a horror film, and to me, that's a good thing. 




flint757 said:


> The Thing Prequel was such a missed opportunity. I'm a big FX guy and I watched all of the behind the scene stuff for the practical effects, of which the original is legendary for as well. The studio cut ALL of it out because they thought they'd have to build a CGI version anyhow to fix holes in the plot, so they figured they'd just only use CGI (no faith in the film, and only looking out for the profit margin). So they moved all of the pre-production budget to the post-production and you get something that totally missed the point of the original in the process. The practical effects looked amazing and definitely looked far superior to the video game quality CGI we ended up with in the end. Yet another reason why I hate Hollywood.




In my previous post I wasn't really talking about the latest remake of the Thing, I was talking about Carpenter's version, which is actually a remake of an older 50's film. But anyways, the SFX on The Fly and The Thing (1982 version) are so awesome.I love practical effects. The ribcage mouth/spider head is one of my favorite pieces next to the werewolf transformation in American Werewolf in London or the brundlefly. I remember seeing videos of the practical fx they made for the 2012 thing and they looked really good, it was such a waste to not use that version of the monster. 
CGI is fine when used intelligently imo, the problem is that it doesn't feel "real" on screen like it does when they use practical fx. A great example would be the Hobbit vs Lord of the Rings. The goblin fight scene in the first hobbit movie felt too "fake" since it was all green screened, versus when Boromir and the fellowship fight the Uruk-hai, it felt much more "real" since it was stuntman in makeup/masks.


----------

