New Hellboy Image Assembles the BPRD

With the Hellboy trailer dropping on Thursday, Lionsgate has started to ramp up their promotion of Neil Marshall’s film, starring Stranger Things‘ David Harbour in the title role. Yesterday they revealed the new, horns-heavy poster, and now a new photo courtesy of Entertainment Weekly includes a fresh image and some plot points from Harbour. The new shot shows Hellboy surrounded by a fellow member of the BPRD (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense), Major Ben Daimo (Daniel Dae Kim), and civilian Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) who has a connection to Hellboy’s magical world thanks to having been kidnapped by fairies as a child.

Harbour told EW that one key plot point in the new Hellboy is that when the film begins, he’s just learning what fans of the Mike Mignola comics have known all along; he’s a good guy with a real bad omen hovering around him:

“It’s not an origin story, but it’s his coming to terms with where he came from. He’s been Hellboy for a long time, but there’s a new turn of events at the start of the film, where people start to bring up the fact that he might bring about the end of the world, and it’s really the first time he’s heard anything like that. The question that comes up in the movie is where does he really belong?”

This is the paradox of Hellboy; he fights for the good guys against all sorts of gruesome beasts and monsters, but he himself is a harbinger of the apocalypse. In fact, he’s referred to as “The Beast of the Apocalypse,” and his stone arm plays a key role in releasing ancient demons that will destroy the planet.

So how does a good guy with an apparently world-ending and predetermined outcome fight for the BPRD? That sounds like a key question in Marshall’s film. The BPRD will not be able to handle the latest threat—Nimue the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich)—without Hellboy’s help, yet the very fact of his existence is a mortal danger to all the folks he fights for. Complicating matters further is that the BPRD is run by Hellboy’s adoptive father, Trevor Brutenholm (Ian McShane), as well as the fact that the Blood Queen, like Hellboy, is an outcast, a witch who isn’t thrilled about how her kind has been treated by the people Hellboy protects. Might he find himself agreeing with her, at least in part?

Perhaps we’ll have a better sense of how all this ties together once the trailer drops tomorrow.

Hellboy burns into theaters on April 12, 2019.

Featured image: Hellboy poster. Courtesy Lionsgate.