I am having a hard time believing that the Hellboy reboot with David Harbour in the lead is five years old and came out prior to the pandemic because it means that we cannot pin its dismal $21 million domestic box office (on a $50 million budget) on COVID-19. That it flopped was not really a fluke. It was a message from moviegoers that they weren’t interested.

And yet, here we are, five years later, with another reboot of the franchise in what looks like a film made not to succeed but to retain the rights to some IP. This looks terrible. It comes from Brian Taylor, one half of the duo (along with Mark Neveldine) responsible for the catastrophic failures that where Jonah Hex and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, back-to-back failures that clearly broke up the directing team and put them in directing jail for over a decade.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man will not revive Brian Taylor’s directing career. The minute-long trailer features Jack Kesy (The Strain, Claws) as our new Hellboy, along with a cast that includes Jefferson White (best known as Jimmy in Yellowstone) and no one else I’ve heard of. It looks laughably bad.