You’ll be hard-pressed to find better superhero movies than Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, but don’t expect Hellboy 3 anytime soon. That pin in your balloon of hopeful enthusiasm comes straight from director Guillermo del Toro, who says that series star Ron Perlman has been a little premature with his attempts to rally fans around a third entry in the series.

Speaking with The Daily Beast (as part of a much longer interview about his entire career that you really should read), del Toro got real about a third Hellboy adventure:

The hard fact is that the movie’s going to need about $120 million and there’s nobody knocking down our doors to give it to us. It’s a little beyond Kickstarter ... It would be great to complete the trilogy. But in a way I don’t see the world — the industry — supporting that idea.

He has a point. Both Hellboy movies were well-liked upon release, but both only did modest business. In summers dominated by Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight, they couldn’t help but look like disappointments. It’s especially annoying because the second film deliberately leaves certain plot threads dangling and it’s looking like those plot threads are never going to get the follow-up they deserve.

As the years go on, the odds of Hellboy 3 ever happening grow increasingly slim. Perlman is 65 years old and del Toro is about to begin filming Pacific Rim 2. The stars need to align in a pretty big way for this to happen. However, del Toro does note in the same interview that Legendary, the company behind Pacific Rim and his upcoming haunted house movie Crimson Peak, may be willing to foot the bill for Hellboy 3 is Pacific Rim 2 does big business.

So there you go: keep on dreaming the impossible dream, Hellboy fans. We may get to see the apocalypse yet.

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