The script also incorporates a number of elements from The Chained Coffin storyline, which sheds light on Hellboy’s backstory. But less was certainly more for Mignola, who believes the main failure behind the 2019 revamp was its desire to merge several decades’ worth of ideas into one cinematic entity. “Let’s not say, ‘Oh, but it’d be great to have Lobster Johnson!’ ‘It’d be great to have this other character in it!’ Yes, everybody’s got favorite bits from 30 years of Hellboy, but let’s not try to shoehorn a bunch of extra sh** in here where we don’t need it.”

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On the less optimistic side of things, Mignola goes on to confirm that the odds of Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley) getting to close out his acclaimed Hellboy trilogy are lower than Hell itself:

“I just can’t see him coming back to doing Hellboy again. He’s got so many other things he’s always wanted to do. It’s a shame [the trilogy] didn’t get finished, but I just don’t think it was ever really going to happen. It was kind of a dream thing, but I don’t think it was ever realistic. From what I understand, it would have been amazingly expensive, following up two movies that didn’t make money.”