Ron Perlman Finally Reveals the Real Reason Hellboy 3 Never Happened

Ron Perlman finally said the quiet part out loud about Hellboy 3: it didn’t fall apart because fans bailed or the studio lost interest. It fizzled because some of the key creative folks moved on. And yeah, he’d still suit up at 75 if the stars aligned.

The quick backstory

• 2004: Writer-director Guillermo del Toro launches Hellboy with Ron Perlman in the lead. Well-reviewed, broadly liked.
• 2008: Hellboy II: The Golden Army doubles down on the world-building and ends with a big setup: Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) is pregnant with twins, and Hellboy’s long-teased destiny to either destroy or save the world is still hanging over him.
• 2019: The franchise gets rebooted by director Neil Marshall with David Harbour as Hellboy.
• 2024: Another reboot arrives: Hellboy: The Crooked Man.

What Perlman actually said

On The Joe Vulpis Podcast, when asked if Hellboy 3 ever got close to happening, Perlman’s answer was a blunt "No." Pressed on why, he said "People moved on," then clarified he meant "Some of the creatives," not the audience.

"I wanted to do it. We owed it to the fans. I still do. I’ll do it now at 75 years old, if the right person comes along and says, 'Okay.' Because it was meant to be a trilogy... At the end of the second one, she’s with twins, and he still hasn’t destroyed the Earth or saved the Earth, which is his oracle. The third movie was gonna have all that in it. It was gonna be the resolve."

"I don’t know if there was ever a script, but Guillermo had figured out what the final movie would look like. It would have been epic."

Translation: what that all means

Del Toro’s two movies were set up as part of a three-act plan. The second film literally ends with Liz expecting twins and Hellboy’s prophecy looming. The third film would have paid off that destiny and wrapped the whole thing up. Perlman doesn’t know if an official script ever existed, but says del Toro had the story in place. The problem wasn’t fan interest; it was momentum. Some of the creative team moved on, and without everyone rowing in the same direction, the trilogy just... didn’t happen.

The money piece (and why that mattered)

Perlman points out the Hellboy films didn’t make Marvel money, which meant no automatic studio mandate to keep cranking out sequels. Still, he argues fans dug the movies and that they remain among the superhero genre’s more celebrated entries. That praise lines up with how the first two were received: critically liked and generally embraced by audiences.

The sting

The weird part is we got not one but two reboots instead of the proper finale the second film was clearly setting up. According to Perlman, del Toro had an epic ending in mind. Fans never got that resolution; they got a reset button. If you’ve been waiting since 2008 for the twins and the prophecy to matter, you weren’t imagining things — that was the plan. It just never made it to camera.