In the week leading up to the release of the new Hellboy film, Lionsgate unleashed something called a “Super R-RATED Sizzle Reel!” to showcase what the studio hoped to be the chief appeal of their $50m (£38.1m) reimagining of Mike Mignola’s comic books: a grand parade of violence, blood, gore, mutilation and foul-mouthed mischief. The montage wasn’t coy about its intentions. Title cards proclaiming: “Hellboy is rated R / For strong bloody violence/ Gore throughout” are intercut with clips of a giant tearing a man in half, Hellboy ripping out a troll’s eye and similar imagery.
In an age where gleefully bloody and bad-mouthed superhero movies such as Deadpool and Logan lay waste to the box office, such an approach makes sense on paper. But the numbers are now in, and the third Hellboy movie has made $22.1m at the box office (just $12m of which was in the US), and has just a 15% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s not simply a catastrophic result compared to the R-rated superhero films its marketing strategy clearly aped, but compared to other adult-targeted films in general. Just by way of comparison, even the lame 2010 reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street managed to bring in $63m during its first weekend.
Can it really be that this particular market has already been exhausted, just three years after Deadpool proved it existed, opening with $132m and becoming the most profitable film of the X-Men franchise, as well as one of the highest grossing R-rated movies?
The key difference is one of tone. Deadpool’s key selling point was never its adult-only entry policy, but its comic tone: mocking the genre it also adored. The days of swallowing superhero content without a pinch of salt disappeared the moment Henry Cavill screeched “Save Martha!” at a bewildered, bat-mask wearing Ben Affleck.
The great superhero success of the pre-Endgame game has, rather, been Shazam!: an energetically relaxed and family-friendly spin on the genre. With a relatively unknown lead and a hero who has not been enjoying much mainstream attention (even though he was the first superhero to ever grace the silver screen back in 1941), it still managed the crown at the box office two weekends in a row, is about to cross the $100m mark and already has its sequel approved.
Movies that might seem to buck the humour trend actually pay lip service to it: Venom was a critically panned and remarkably bloody mess that tried to be dark, violent and sinister, and ended up hilariously entertaining and fun. Audience amusement doesn’t have to be intentional on the part of the film-makers. But, sadly for Hellboy, it wasn’t quite so atrocious to make the so-bad-it’s-good grade either.
On the other hand, Logan wasn’t a barrel of laughs, but it was meta and knowing, an audience-embracing enterprise in a way Hellboy is not. It took viewers along for the final ride of a character who had grown and changed with them. Hellboy, despite having enjoyed success at the hands of Guillermo del Toro more than a decade ago, is now disappointing audiences. It contains little of what viewers loved about the Del Toro movies, its plot is merely an excuse for possible sequels and its lead David Harbour lacks the jutting-jawed charisma of previous Hellboy incumbent Ron Perlman.
As the Avengers saga wraps up, superhero movies are scrambling to plug the gap and reinvent the wheel. But simply soaking the screen in blood seems unlikely to suffice.
Yet there might be hope for R-rated superheroes in the future. The James Gunn-produced anti-Superman tale Brightburn is hitting cinemas next month, promising not just blood and gore, but a subversive twist on the classic superhero origin story – Superman meets Omen is the idea. idea. Also, DC’s gritty take on The Joker might be headed for an R-rating – surprisingly – for nudity.
In the best-case scenario, the teams behind both these projects long since realised that relying simply on shock value is a non-starter. While Brightburn is gearing up to be a commentary on the genre in itself, The Joker one is apparently more interested in dissecting its hero than having him perform any skybeam-related activities. If that is true, they should have probably passed on the memo to Hellboy’s makers before it was too late.
