Hellboy: The Crooked Man banished to VOD release

In keeping with the movie’s stripped-down approach, the new horror-based Hellboy movie, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, won’t be raining hellfire and brimstone down upon movie theaters. Instead, it’s coming straight home, where screens are also smaller. Comicbook.com reported earlier today that Crooked Man will be available on video on demand on October 8. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like we’ll see Hellboy rip his horns off on the big, American silver screen. The film received a limited release in Belgium, the U.K., and presumably Hellboy’s hometown of the Fifth Circle of Hell. What are we, chopped liver?

That doesn’t condemn the movie like a direct-to-video order did in the past. This is a smaller Hellboy, at least much smaller than the $50 million 2019 reboot or the $82 million Golden Army from 2008. Directed by Brian Taylor, the co-director of the masterful Crank: High Voltage, and based on one of the character’s earliest adventures, the film hopes to return Big Rad to his paranormal investigator roots. On that front, Crooked Man looks like it delivers, with its folk-horror atmosphere and cabin-in-the-wood setting, which is admittedly cheaper than shooting in Hell.

We, for one, welcome the idea of smaller superhero movies made outside the major studio confines, where the likes of Mike Mignola can see his Hellboy on screen. Speaking to The A.V. Club, Hellboy creator and Crooked Man screenwriter said he has “never seen something that is that close to my work.”

“With del Toro, at the beginning, he said, ‘There are some things I don’t think will work as a film.’ And I said, ‘I did it my way, you do whatever you want,'” he continued. “Because I always want to respect the filmmaker, whoever that is, and you don’t want a filmmaker trying to second guess material they don’t understand. So if that means they’re going to bring some of themselves to it, that’s fine. In a very real way, my version is the books.”

Hellboy: The Crooked Man streams on VOD on October 8.”