Hellboy II Originally Included A Post-Credits Scene We Never Got To See

The comic adventures of “Hellboy” have yet to stop. Even after the world itself ended in the story “B.P.R.D. The Devil You Know,” creator Mike Mignola and co. have kept revisiting Hellboy’s world with various prequel stories.

In contrast, the original silver screen Hellboy, played by Ron Perlman and directed by Guillermo del Toro, remains in limbo. “Hellboy III” has remained a dream for almost two decades, one that’s unlikely to ever become reality. Perlman has maintained he’d come back if del Toro would, but Mignola has moved the franchise into two successive (and disappointing) reboots.

What would “Hellboy III” have been like? The magical second film “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” originally included a post-credits scene to directly tease the trilogy’s finale. This stinger, never filmed, would’ve resurrected the first films villains: Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden), the Russian Mad Monk himself, and his cyborg assassin Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran).

“Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie” includes a page describing the scrapped scene. Five helicopters belonging to Roderick Zinco (“billionaire, madman”) fly and land in Antarctica. Zinco enters an underground lab left over by the Nazis, filled with “tanks, weapons and death rays out of a bad ’40s pulp novel,” including a headless robot. Then, Zinco reveals the severed head of Kroenen (preserved in a liquid jar) and attaches it to the robot. Zinco looks on as his and Kroenen’s ghostly master, Rasputin, reveals himself and promises “So shall be the end of it all…”

As far back as 2007, Beran was reported to be under consideration to return for a cameo in “Hellboy II.” But despite del Toro’s desire to include the scene, “there was no way we could accommodate it with the budget or the time. I thought it was a perfect coda and a beautiful set-up to a possible third movie.”

The scene was made, but only as a motion comic. Going beyond the scene as described in “The Art of the Movie,” the motion-comic opens with Zinco and his men venturing through Rasputin’s Siberian lair from the first movie to retrieve Kroenen’s corpse.

In “Hellboy,” Rasputin and Kroenen are the ones who summoned the young Hellboy to Earth in 1944, all part of the so-called Project Ragna Rok.

Rasputin (a magician and advisor to Nicholas II, last Tsar of Russia) was historically killed in 1916, assassinated by Russian aristocrats who thought he was a negative influence on the Tsar. However, his sinister reputation and appearance mean he has endured as a villain in pop culture, which often portrays him as a genuine dark wizard, not a charlatan. Sir Christopher Lee played Rasputin in 1966 Hammer horror film, “Rasputin the Mad Monk,” and an undead Rasputin (voiced by Christopher Lloyd) is the villain of Don Bluth’s 1997 Disney-ish animated musical “Anastasia,” which imagines Nicholas II’s daughter surviving the October Revolution.

In “Hellboy,” Rasputin returned from death thanks to the Ogdru Jahad, seven ancient dragons and the prophesied beasts of the apocalypse. Finding new purpose in beginning the world’s end, Rasputin conned his way into Hitler’s inner circle the way he had the Tsar’s. He sold Project Ragna Rok as a last ditch effort for the Axis to win World War 2, but his real plans would’ve seen the Nazis obliterated with the allies.

As for Kroenen, he is a Nazi scientist and one of Rasputin’s henchmen. In the comics, he’s a “normal” (as much as Nazi can be) and rather mundane villain, notable only for his robot-like gas mask. Del Toro’s “Hellboy” seized on that detail and made Kroenen into a cyborg, with dual arm blades and clockwork gears for a heart; he’s so past his natural life span that he bleeds dust. As far as I’m concerned, these changes made Kroenen into a more memorable villain.

 Mr. Zinco is a villain from Mignola’s Hellboy comics, specifically the second major arc: 1996’s “Wake The Devil.” In that comic, he too was an evil industrialist who fell under Rasputin’s puppeteering control and worked alongside Kroenen. Zinco does not survive “Wake The Devil,” but his Zinco Corporation and its later leaders become villains in the spin-off comic, “B.P.R.D.” (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense).

Del Toro’s first Hellboy film broadly follows the first comic arc, “Seed of Destruction” and ends the same way. Rasputin, holding Liz Sherman hostage, tries to force Hellboy to summon the Ogdru Jahad. Instead, Hellboy rejects his destiny and destroys Rasputin. In “Wake the Devil” and the arc after that “Conqueror Worm,” Rasputin returns as a ghost puppeteering other villains in service of his plans to destroy the world.

In “Wake the Devil,” Rasputin’s pawns are Zinco and the female Nazi Ilsa Haupstein (who wants her vampire lover Vladimir Giurescu returned to her). In “Conqueror Worm,” it’s Herman Von Klempt, an undead Nazi scientist who survives as a head in a jar. Kroenen’s appearance in this stinger definitively evokes Von Klempt. Presumably, del Toro planned to merge the two villains, using Von Klempt’s design for an upgraded Kroenen, rather than introduce a previously unseen member of Project Ragna Rok.

“Wake The Devil” had previously inspired the animated “Hellboy” film “Blood & Iron,” which was produced by del Toro and featured the cast of his movies. Was del Toro also going to use the story to wrap up his trilogy? It’s hard to say, especially since the “Hellboy” movies had already changed a lot from the comics.

In the movies, Hellboy and Liz share a romance they never had in the comics. In “Hellboy II,” Liz makes a deal with the Angel of Death to stay its hand from a mortally wounded Hellboy. If he’s spared, the Angel warns, then he will one day — however long away it may be — embrace his destiny as demon prince Anung Un Rama and end the world. But Liz says that’s a fair trade; she’s pregnant, and her twins will need their dad.

Ron Perlman has confirmed that Hellboy and Liz’s kids, naturally, would’ve played a big part in the third film: “One would look like the mum and one would look like the dad. And one of them was going to be completely f**king corrupt, the other one angelic. Which one was which? Only Guillermo would make the f**ked-up-looking one be the angel.”

In a 2019 commentary for the director’s cut of “Hellboy,” del Toro described that first film as “a story of two fathers with a single son,” meaning Prof. Trevor Bruttenholm (John Hurt) and Rasputin and their shared son, Hellboy. One raises him as a human, the other pushes him to be a devil. The next step would be Hellboy becoming a father himself, but according to Perlman, our hero still wouldn’t be able to fight fate in the end: “[Hellboy is] the beast of the Apocalypse. He has to take down civilization. He has to. It’s non-negotiable. That’s the foundation for the story.”

Del Toro himself made similar, and more detailed comments, about his planned “Hellboy III” in 2014: 

“The idea for it was to have Hellboy finally come to terms with the fact that his destiny, his inevitable destiny, is to become the beast of the Apocalypse, and having him and Liz face the sort of, that part of his nature, and he has to do it, in order to be able to ironically vanquish the foe that he has to face in the 3rd film. He has to become the best of the Apocalypse to be able to defend humanity, but at the same time he becomes a much darker being.”

Who would’ve been this foe? Rasputin once more, as this deleted post-credit scene suggests? Hecate, the serpentine Greek Goddess of Witchcraft and the other main villain in “Wake The Devil”? Azzael, Hellboy’s birth father? Nimue the Blood Queen, villain of the rebooted “Hellboy” movie from 2019 (that was first planned as a “Golden Army” sequel)? Or an entirely original villain, just like the del Toro-created villain of “Hellboy II,” elf-prince Nuada (Luke Goss).

Mignola declined del Toro’s wish to turn “Hellboy III” into a comic, saying he preferred to keep the movies and comic versions of Hellboy in separate mediums. Though Mignola’s Hellboy never became a father, his comic saga ultimately had a similarly fatalistic ending as del Toro envisioned. In “The Devil You Know,” the world ends in fire and then Hellboy gives himself over to Hecate, sacrificing himself so his blood will flow across the world and new life can spring from its charred remains. 

Hellboy does indeed have two fathers — Mignola and del Toro themselves — and like many real parents, they had different visions and disagreements about the path their child should take. I wish we could see, in full, where both paths would’ve led.