The Canceled Hellboy Spin-Off That Gave His Coworkers The Spotlight

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The conclusion of Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy" trilogy seems destined to never see the light of day. It's been almost two decades since "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," del Toro himself said in 2017 that "Hellboy 3" will "100%" not be happening, and original Hellboy creator Mike Mignola pushed the films into a reboot in 2019 (and then another with 2024's "Hellboy: The Crooked Man").

In May 2017, the day after the Neil Marshall-directed "Hellboy" reboot was announced, Peter Briggs (a writer of the 2004 "Hellboy," who didn't come back for "The Golden Army") revealed on Facebook that Universal once (in 2010) had even greater plans for Hellboy. It turns out "Hellboy 3" wasn't the only del Toro-Hellboy project that got axed.

Enter "Hellboy: Silverlance," a proposed spin-off about forest elf Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), the main villain of "The Golden Army." Briggs was approached to write it, and he turned in a draft with co-writer Aaron Mason.

The problem with the premise, as Briggs noted, was that Nuada had died in "The Golden Army." The easy solution was to make the spin-off a prequel; the stop-motion prologue for del Toro's "Hellboy" sequel revealed that Nuada had departed his father's kingdom thousands of years prior, leaving centuries' worth of stories about his exile. However, Briggs and Mason still intended to include Hellboy and his co-workers. The true main character of "Silverlance" would be Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), the fishman partner of Hellboy (Ron Perlman) at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.), who'd fallen for Nuada's sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) back in "The Golden Army."

Hellboy's name wasn't in the title just for branding; he would also appear in "Silverlance" in a supporting role. "I suppose you could liken it to a 'Suicide Squad' situation: Batman was in there, but the story wasn't really about him," wrote Briggs. But like "Hellboy 3" itself, "Silverlance" didn't happen.

As Briggs' post explained, "Silverlance" was backburnered to focus on "Hellboy 3" itself. Then, it got another push in 2015 when "Hellboy 3" was looking unlikely to happen. After that, Briggs reworked the pitch to exclude Hellboy himself and retitled it as "Silverlance: From The Files Of The B.P.R.D."

The film would feature Abe settling into the new B.P.R.D. headquarters in the Colorado mountains, where the Bureau moved in their spin-off "B.P.R.D." comic. Hellboy and his firestarting girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) left the Bureau at the end of "The Golden Army," so it'd be easy enough to excuse their absence. Abe, still feeling a psychic link to the late Nuala, would research her and her brother's history. In doing so, per Briggs, Abe would've uncovered the following tales:

"We would have seen Nuada's connection to a rival fairy courtier who seeks control of the fairy kingdom (and Nuala's hand in marriage), and engineers the machinations that cause Prince Nuada's expulsion. We'd have seen Nuada in different timezones down the centuries, including his first meeting with [his troll henchman] Mister Wink in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition (Nuada saves Wink from a troupe of soldiers); and Nuada in Nazi Germany in World War 2 engineering a pact to keep various supernatural entities unharmed from the conflict. (We would have seen Nuada and Kroenen fighting in a 'friendly' bout for a bunch of Project Ragnarok goons.)"

According to Briggs, Jones would have played not only Abe, but also the Angel of Death from "Hellboy II," "with whom Prince Nuada strikes a bargain." Rookie B.P.R.D. Agent John Myers (Rupert Evans) from "Hellboy" would have returned too. The climax would've somehow involved the gauntlet that Grigori Rasputin (Karl Roden) used to summon Hellboy himself to Earth way back in 1944.

"If it had been successful, it would have been the first in a series of 'From The Files Of The B.P.R.D.' projects," Briggs explained. Of course, the unmade film didn't even get the chance to become a success or failure.

According to Briggs, Universal was happy with the new "Silverlance" pitch, but Mike Richardson (founder of Dark Horse Comics) asked that the studio "put a pin in it" because the "Hellboy" film reboot was already in the works.

Nuada and Nuala are original creations of del Toro's films, with no basis in Mignola and co.'s "Hellboy" comics. (Nuada's closest counterparts are probably Koshchei the Deathless, a Russian swordsman cursed with immortality and service to the witch Baba Yaga, and Gruagach, an Irish fairy with a grudge against Hellboy.) If "Hellboy" was going to be rebooted, then that meant they couldn't do a film with the original "Hellboy II" characters. Which, as Briggs noted, was a big problem, since the movie was all about two of those original characters.

Briggs suggested doing a different "B.P.R.D." project centered around comic villain the Black Flame, but that didn't pan out either. The last Briggs heard about "Silverlance" from Universal was in 2016, when it still seemed interested. The announcement of Neil Marshall's "Hellboy" caused Briggs to proclaim "Silverlance" to be "now officially dead."

While "Silverlance" is as dead as Nuada himself, and there's been no successful "Hellboy" spin-off film yet, the "Hellboy" comics are a different story. There are countless "Hellboy" comic spin-offs, almost too many to read all of them. Mignola, with a roster of regular writer and artist collaborators, has left no stone of his shared setting unturned.

Comic book critic Matt Draper has described the world of "Hellboy" as a mosaic, "a massive image made up of many small moments, coming together to form something intricate and cohesive." The pieces of this mosaic range from monster-hunting short stories featuring Hellboy himself to the adventures of the 1930s vigilante (and would-be Bruce Campbell character) Lobster Johnson. The stories also jump all across time while still fitting together as a single chronology.

Hellboy left the B.P.R.D. at the end of the 2001 mini-series "Conqueror Worm." That led to the "B.P.R.D." spin-off comic (written primarily by Mignola and/or John Arcudi and drawn by Guy Davis), which kept up with the coworkers Hellboy left behind. "B.P.R.D." delved more into Abe's backstory, revealing that despite him resembling the Gill-Man and his label as an "Icthyo Sapien," he is not part of a long lost species of fish-humans. In fact, Abe was originally Langdon Everett Caul, a 19th century scientist and member of the Oannes Society, a sea-life obsessed doomsday cult. In the 1860s, Caul was transformed by a jellyfish-like ocean deity, the Water Spirit, and left frozen in a cryo-tube, where the B.P.R.D. eventually found "Abe" (named in tribute to Abraham Lincoln). Abe slowly came to terms with his past, meeting the ghost of Caul's wife Edith Howard and later stopping the surviving Oannes Society from triggering an apocalypse.

Abe Sapien, too, has gotten plenty of solo spin-off comics. These range from short stories like "The Drowning" (Abe's first B.P.R.D. mission without Hellboy, where he investigates a haunted island) to an "Abe Sapien" ongoing where he travels across a monster-infected U.S.

If you're disappointed that there'll be no "Hellboy 3" or "Silverlance," then remember: the world of Hellboy is much more vast than the movies. The "Hellboy" comics sit ready for you to dive into the way Abe Sapien dives into water.