Hey, Hollywood, Ron Perlman’s given you some fun times, right? Sons Of Anarchy, Pacific Rim, even some of the better parts of Alien: Resurrection. So what do you say you do your old pal Ron a favor, huh, and give him some money to make a third Hellboy movie? What’s a hundred million bucks between friends?
Yep, it turns out that Ron Perlman would really like to play Mike Mignola’s famous demon again, and not just in one of those feel-good Make-A-Wish situations (although, given that Perlman seems like a great guy, he’d probably be up for that too.) Who knows why Perlman is so set on resurrecting the character for a third outing—maybe he just does his best thinking in the makeup chair, while technicians slather him in red paint and sideburns—but he’s started a new Twitter campaign to keep interest in the project alive.
There’s something to be said for Perlman’s argument that “we earned it”; Hellboy II: The Golden Army made back nearly twice its budget back in 2008, despite having The Dark Knight open against it in its second week. In any case, the actor has been joined in his muthafucking awareness-raising efforts by supportive tweets from co-stars Selma Blair and Doug Jones, as well as producer Lloyd Levin. (David Hyde Pierce, who shared the role of heroic fishman Abe Sapien with Jones, has stayed silent on the matter, as he has on every Twitter matter since 2012). Also notably absent from the #HellboyIII campaign: director Guillermo del Toro, who gave away at least some of the planned movie’s plot in a Reddit AMA last year, while also explaining that the film had become functionally impossible to fund.
Still, Perlman’s initial tweet has already picked up 16,000 retweets. If each one of those button clicks translated to a purchased ticket—and while that’s unlikely, is it any more implausible than a good-hearted demon with a love of pancakes and kittens, huh?—then Perlman would already be about $160,000 of the way toward the $85 million Hellboy II cost to make. In other words, stay tuned for the $84,840,000 Hellboy III Kickstarter, probably coming sometime later this year.