‘Hellboy II’ Just Missed the Superhero Boom https://filmschoolrejects.com/hellboy-2-just-missed-the-superhero-boom/ via @OnePerfectShot What allowed the two films to exist, it’s gone. The Bluray DVD performance of the first Hellboy was massive. So big, that Ben Feingold, at Columbia, went full-on on the sequel development

Ben was so impressed by those numbers that he made Hellboy one of the very first blurays from Columbia Pictures. Far as I can recall, the number for home video surpassed theatrical.

The movie is one my top five I have directed.

The first HELLBOY movie was developed BEFORE even X-MEN was on film. I remember visiting MYSTERY MEN's set to try to convince Universal to green light it. It languished for a long time. To my mind, the first BLADE was instrumental in showing how superhero movies could exist--

--at the end of the 20th century. There was a collision of DARK CITY and BLADE that somehow, in subtle ways paved the way, via Anime, for MATRIX to explode into the world.

But, still, back then it was a countermovement to try and do superhero films, specially with material that didn't have Marvel numbers. For many years, to me, the proto-comic book movie was Verhoeven's ROBOCOP in so many ways.