Hellboy2 GalleryreleaseposterAnother comic book movie has landed at #1 at the box office, as HELLBOY II led the way:

Hellboy II: The Golden Army stormed onto approximately 4,400 screens at 3,204 theaters and grossed an estimated $35.9 million over the weekend, a significant bump over its predecessor’s $23.1 million start. That was the bar for Hellboy II’s success, but the movie also posted a greater debut than the similar comic book adventure, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which opened on the same date five years ago.

Oh no you didn’t Box Office Mojo! At any rate the good reviews and good debut cement Guillermo del Toro’s place as a filmmaker who can open a movie, and sets the scene for the hobbits very nicely. Nikki FInke praised the canny marketing for the film:

Obviously, the studio’s uber-marketing attempt to humanize the Guillermo del Toro pic’s bizarro collection of characters from the Dark Horse comic book worked nicely. That’s why Ron Perlman as Hellboy did promos on every NBC Uni media outlet imaginable. (Even on cable’s Oxygen channel with Bravo’s James Lipton interviewing him…) “We wanted to make him as audience friendly and accessible as possible,” one Uni exec explained to me. The fact that Hellboy II made 50% more than the 2004 first movie’s $23.1M opening FSS is a real triumph for Universal Pictures, whose bosses Marc Shmuger, David Linde and Donna Langley swooped in and scooped up the sequel from Sony/Revolution Studios which did the original Hellboy I.

1 COMMENT

  1. Agree with Evie — the visuals were great. Some parts of the story I could have done without, but it was an enjoyable film. I hope it can maintain some sort of momentum once Dark Knight hits.

  2. I also thought this movie was pretty damn good. It was a fun action packed and funny movie.

    That being said, I have to wonder if this movie would have done a hell (pun intended) lot better at the box office if it was called BPRD instead of HELLBOY. Let’s be honest, the title “HELLBOY” does not have that mass marketing/wide audience appeal. MOST people have a hard time accepting a demon as a heroic character, especially if he is named “Hellboy”.

  3. In theory a name like Hellboy might at least appeal to a counterculture, if indeed one still exists.

    Aside from the design-work, I found it far more “ordinary” than I did THE INCREDIBLE HULK, which seemed to get slagged a lot more than HB for roughly the same storytelling “sins.”

  4. I just hope that the DVD extras include MacFarlane doing Family Guy voices (Peter and Stewie) for some of Krauss’s dialogue.

  5. Wow, did I watch a different movie than everyone else? I HATED it. It was one of the worst comic book movies I’ve seen. Definitely the worst this year.

    I can’t quite put my finger on what I hated so much. I just wasn’t getting into it. The only thing I liked was the villains argument that HELLBOY should be with him.

    Other than that, though… maybe it was that there was too much weird and almost no real human characters. Manning seemed to be totally schizophrenic and completely different than he was in the first movie. We lost the kid. The smoke-guy annoyed the crap out of me.

    I don’t know… I was deeply, deeply disappointed. I’ve been telling people to skip it. I’m glad everyone else had a good time, but i felt really bad that I drug a non-comix friend along. I thought she’d be surprised about how good it was. Instead, I was apologizing.

  6. I’m sorry it didn’t do better than Wanted which was just awful, but an amazing looking film not afraid to take the time to let the characters have some goofy human moments. So much imagination, so rare to see that in a summer action flick.

  7. Just seen it.
    Loved the first one.
    This one could have been an hour shorter.
    Nice to see Elric in a movie.
    Couldn’t recommend it to anyone.
    CGI sucks.

  8. I second the best summer movie so far vote. It reminded me of those great fun 80’s movies like Time Bandits.

  9. I felt I got my money’s worth and I’m very picky when it comes to what movies I will watch. I have brains. I thought it was better than the majority of summer movies out there except Batman. Save the complaining for the truly bad movies out there. This is not one of them.