Hellboy's David Harbour says "Marvel stuff" has spoiled us for other comic book movies

By Sam Barsanti | May 28, 2019 | 9:33pm

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Hellboy's David Harbour says "Marvel stuff" has spoiled us for other comic book movies

Photo: Theo Wargo

Neil Marshall’s attempted reboot of the Hellboy movies wasn’t great (some might even call it “bad”), but star David Harbour has a theory on why the reaction from fans and critics was so cold: We’ve all had too much chocolate. Actually, there’s more to it than that, with “chocolate” in this case being a metaphor for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This comes from a chat with Digital Spy, where Harbor explains that, like chocolate, the “Marvel stuff” is really just one flavor. “So everybody goes ‘chocolate is delicious and these guys make the best chocolate,’ so as you judge [other comic book movies], it’s like, ‘well it’s not as chocolatey as this, this does not taste like chocolate at all.’” Harbour says he’d like to live in a world “where there’s more flavors than just comparisons to chocolate,” because when you hold something like his dark and violent Hellboy movie up against what he calls “the chocolate spectrum,” it doesn’t look so great.

However, Harbor also recognizes that it’s not Marvel’s fault that his Hellboy movie wasn’t well received. “It also has major problems,” he noted, adding that it would be a “fun” movie to rent or see on a flight (brutal self-burn). The main issue that Harbor sees seems to be that there were too many people offering input on what they thought the movie should be, leading to a film that failed to really do any one thing very well. “I did what I could do and I feel proud of what I did,” he says, “but ultimately I’m not in control of a lot of those things.”