Ron Perlman Not Eager to Make ‘Hellboy 3′ at ‘71 F—king Years Old,’ but ‘We Owe This to Fans’

Ron Perlman is turning 72 years old in April, but he’s refusing to let age get in the way of a potential third “Hellboy” movie with director Guillermo del Toro. The two earned raves for 2004’s “Hellboy” and 2008’s “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” but the sequel didn’t crack $200 million at the worldwide box office and thus the studio pulled the plug on del Toro’s plan for a trilogy-ending third movie. “Hellboy” fans have since been waiting 14 years for del Toro’s “Hellboy 3.” Speaking to The Independent this month, Perlman told del Toro it’s time to get their long-overdue third “Hellboy” movie made.

“Am I eager to do Hellboy 3? No, I’m 71 fucking years old,” Perlman said. “[But] we owe this to the fans, and we should give it to them because it would be an epic conclusion. So Guillermo, if you’re reading, I’m not done pounding you to get this fucking thing done.”

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The “Hellboy” franchise was rebooted in 2019 without del Toro or Perlman’s involvement. “The Descent” filmmaker Neil Marshall stepped into the director’s chair and “Stranger Things” favorite David Harbour took over the title role. The movie was a notorious box office bomb, grossing $44 million worldwide on a $50 million production budget. Perlman told CBM in 2020 that he turned down an offer to appear in the 2019 reboot because of his loyalty to del Toro.

“The reboot was something I had the opportunity to participate in and decided that the only version of ‘Hellboy’ I’m interested in is the one I do with Guillermo,” Perlman said at the time. “So in walking away from it, I truly walked away from it, and haven’t seen it or heard much about it. I wished them well, but it was not in my bailiwick.”

Fan loyalty to del Toro and Perlman is what Harbour cited as the downfall for his “Hellboy” reboot. “I think it failed before we began shooting because I think that people didn’t want us to make the movie,” Harbour posted on social media. “Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman created this iconic thing that we thought could be reinvented and then [fans] certainly — the loudness of the internet was like, ‘We do not want you to touch this.’ People were just very very against it and that’s people’s right.”

Del Toro is perhaps too busy to tackle “Hellboy 3” at the moment. The director just released “Nightmare Alley” and has a stop-motion musical adaptation of “Pinocchio” arriving on Netflix in December. Should del Toro agree to return to the franchise, consider Perlman locked in.

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