First Trailer For Hellboy Reboot Leaks Online

Hellboy fans, get ready to yell "hell yeah!" The first trailer for the forthcoming reboot film has leaked online. 

Unveiled at New York Comic-Con earlier this month, the Hellboy trailer found its way onto the internet after an unidentified fan who attended the convention recorded the footage and uploaded it to Facebook over the weekend (via CBR). 

The trailer quickly spread to all corners of the web, touching Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit and setting each social media site ablaze with frenzied conversations, hot takes, and impassioned reactions. But since sneakily capturing and later uploading exclusive content that isn't supposed to leave the walls of a convention hall is generally frowned-upon, studio Lionsgate was swift in pulling the leaked footage off every platform it could find it on. 

A few versions of the Hellboy trailer are, as of this writing, still up online — like one posted to Reddit by user joem1k. It's likely that Lionsgate will strike that one down in the coming hours, so we've taken a gander at the footage to offer you dear readers a full description of it before that happens. 

The trailer opens on David Harbour's Hellboy walking across a street with Sasha Lane's Alice Monaghan, a woman who was kidnapped by fairies as a child, has some magical powers, and speaks with an Irish lilt. We then see Ian McShane's Trevor Bruttenholm, the adoptive father of Hellboy, standing in a doorway and speaking about the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, the organization he founded. "We're the line in the sand," he says. "We fight against the forces of darkness."

Cutting back to Hellboy and Alice, the trailer shows that they're actually joined by Daniel Dae Kim's Ben Daimio, the military man and member of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense who can transform into a jaguar when he's upset or experiencing pain. When Hellboy asks Ben if "this is it," staring up at the facade of a rather bland-looking fish and chips shop called Codswallop, Ben quips, "Were you expecting a sign that says, 'chief of headquarters?'" The trio enter the storefront, and the woman behind the counter tells Hellboy, "Oi, I need some I.D., love." Hellboy responds, "Um, are you serious?"

After the trailer flashes text across the screen that promises the movie is coming in 2019, we see Hellboy, Alice, and Ben walking down a corridor and into the B.R.P.D. Hellboy is then seen confronting his adoptive father, who made him into the B.R.P.D.'s personal weapon. Professor Bruttenholm defends his past decisions, telling his red-skinned demon son, "I just wanted to help you become the best you."

Their conversation is intercut with a mini montage of Hellboy shooting men in the head, resting in what appears to be the back of a van that's lined with weapons, showing up to a sporting event and sending the crowd screaming, and finally lifting a gun out of a case as he jokes to Alice, "Some dads get their kids LEGOs." She asks him later in the trailer whether they're meant to be "saving the world or something." 

From there, it's a mixture of action shots — like one of a group of people riding on horseback and another of Hellboy fighting someone inside a kitchen — and a smattering of juvenile jokes. 

"Does it do anything special?" one man asks Hellboy, pointing to his stone arm, the Right Hand of Doom that his biological father Azzael gave to him soon after he was born. "Yeah, it smashes things real good," answers Hellboy, who demonstrates the Right Hand of Doom's power by punching the control panel of a moving elevator. 

More text appears on the screen thereafter, and it reads out what could be one of Hellboy's official taglines: "Save the world just for the hell of it." 

A voice offscreen tells Hellboy that he is "mankind's best and only hope," just as the trailer offers the first look at Milla Jovovich in character as the medieval sorceress Nimue, otherwise known as the Blood Queen, whose main goal in life is to destroy humanity. 

Ben then snarks that he thought the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense was "supposed to be fighting monsters, not working with them" — an obvious shot at Hellboy. The demon fires back at Ben, asking him if he's ever seen Scarface, which features a character with the same kind of facial scars Ben has. 

It's a ball of bullets and hellfire from that moment forward, as the Hellboy trailer teases a big battle between the title hero and a massive beast, the I.D.-seeking woman from Codswallop using what looks like a machine gun, and Nimue ripping open the sky to create some kind of life-sucking vortex. When Hellboy asks Nimue if he's interrupting her evil plans, she states that she's just getting started. As she utters those chilling words, the trailer shows Hellboy lifting himself off the ground, his once-shorn-off horns now long with the blazing Crown of the Apocalypse nestled between them. 

The title card appears, followed by "April 2019," and then the trailer ends. 

Lionsgate

Now that we know what goes on in the Hellboy trailer, let's discuss.

First thing's first: fans have pointed out that the leaked footage doesn't really feel like the trailer for film that's repeatedly been described as a dark and mature take on the Hellboy comics created by Mike Mignola. Harbour himself once called the Hellboy reboot a "real monster movie that's dark and scary and about the end of the world," and hinted that the film will subvert stereotypes of the superhero movie genre with grittiness and elements of horror. 

That said, this footage is far lighter in tone than many expected it to be. It goes without the darkness that has long been associated with the Hellboy reboot, peppers in jokes and lots of camp, and sets the whole thing to Billy Idol's "Mony Mony," resulting in a trailer that feels more in line with the ones for Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, and Deadpool than one for an R-rated, horror-heavy comic book movie. 

Additionally, plenty have noted that, based on this trailer, it appears that the new Hellboy will feature the same humor and tone as the original Guillermo del Toro-directed Hellboy movies — which begs the question, "Why even bother rebooting the series?"

On the plus side, it looks like the upcoming movie really will partially adapt Hellboy: The Wild Hunt, just as Mignola mentioned in March of 2018. Written by Mignola and illustrated by Duncan Fegredo, The Wild Hunt chronicles Nimue the Blood Queen's mission to raise "an army of demonic fairies to attack the mortal world in an apocalyptic conflagration."

In all, whether you love everything you just heard here or if it's thrown for a loop, remember this: the Hellboy creative team will probably be in post-production until just before the film's release on April 12, 2019, and this trailer may not be the one Lionsgate ends up releasing as the official trailer down the line. A lot can change in six months, so hang tight, hellions.