“‘Hellboy: The Crooked Man’: Ketchup Entertainment Acquires Rights for Millennium Comic Reboot”
Ketchup Entertainment, a new distributor whose biggest deal to date was the Ben Affleck’s Robert Rodriguez-directed “Hyptonic,” has picked up the rights to the latest “Hellboy” film. Hellboy: The Crooked Man, starring Jack Kesy and directed by Brian Taylor, is the latest attempt to adapt Mike Mingola’s supernatural comic series into a cinematic series.
“We are very pleased with this latest acquisition. “This film holds a special place in the hearts of fans around the world and we are committed to preserving and expanding its legacy while bringing the film to fans and new audiences,” said Gareth West, CEO of Ketchup Entertainment. “We are confident that our collaboration with Jeffrey Greenstein and the exceptional team at Millennium Media will enable us to achieve just that.”
Ron Perlman played Hellboy in “Hellboy” and “Hellboy: The Golden Army.” Neither was a huge success ($99 million worldwide in 2004 and $168 million in 2008), but each Guillermo del Toro-directed entry received good reviews and just enough fan approval to keep people over to make a “Hellboy 3” think. The property was rebooted in 2019 with “Hellboy,” starring David Harbor, which earned poor reviews and just $55 million on a $50 million budget.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man will be the first film in the series to be written by Mike Mignola, who will do so alongside his Dark Horse Comics collaborator Chris Golden. They adapt Mignola’s three-issue comic series of the same name, first published in 2008.
In “The Crooked Man,” Hellboy travels through 1950s Appalachia and meets Tom, a former witch who seeks to repent of his actions by defeating a gang of witches led by Jeremiah Witkins, an 18th-century war profiteer returned from Hell .Century who terrorizes the Hell region as the dreaded Crooked Man.
Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Joseph Marcell, Leah McNamara, Hannah
Margetson and Martin Bassindale will also star in the film. The film is produced by Millennium Media and Dark Horse Entertainment in association with Dark Horse Entertainment, Campbell Grobman Film and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Telepool.
Producers include Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Entertainment and Jeffrey Greenstein, Jonathan Yunger, Les Weldon, Rob Van Norden and Yariv Lerner of Millennium Media. Sam Schulte is co-producer on behalf of Millennium Media.
The Ketchup acquisition was first reported by Deadline.