Hellboy: The Crooked Man’s ending could teach superhero movies a valuable lesson

There’s a new Hellboy movie in cinemas, and while The Crooked Man isn’t as good as the Guillermo Del Toro efforts, it’s a solid comic book flick that gets something right which countless recent superhero films have got wrong.

Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has finally made a Big Red movie that’s all his own. As while Hellboy: The Crooked Man is directed by Brian Taylor, it’s written by Mignola, and closely follows the storyline of one of his own comics.

The year is 1959, and Hellboy finds himself in rural Appalachia, doing battle with mosnters and witches. But his main adversary is the titular Crooked Man, who busies himself by collecting souls for the devil.

The movie – which hit UK screens today – puts them on a collision course, so here’s how that plays out, plus why the lowkey ending is right for this kind of material. So beware of MASSIVE SPOILERS ahead…

Hellboy: The Crooked Man ending explained

At the climax of the movie, Hellboy goes toe-to-toe with The Crooked Man in a house of horrors, and the pair have quite the battle. Which ends with Big Red blowing off the Crooked Man’s head with a gun.

Coins spill out of the villain; money he’d received in exchange for all those souls. Big Red’s buddy Tom Ferrell asks if one of those coins represents the soul that he lost, to which Hellby responds that he will find out, eventually.

The dynamic duo then depart, and soon stumble on a witch, whom they turn into a horse using magical reigns.

Hellboy then finds object of his affections Bobby Jo, who has somehow survived her own ordeal. The pair then locate a phone, and are choppered out of the forest, without the precious spider cargo they were searching for.

As they leave, Bobby Jo holds onto Big Red in an affectionate manner, having been informed of his feelings for her. While the last moment of the movie is a silly gag involving a white horse with red paint daubed on its side that reads “Beware I am a witch.”

Does the superhero reboot have a post-credits scene?

No, Hellboy: The Crooked Man doesn’t have a post-credits scene. Which is something most modern comic book movies could learn from.

Superhero fatigue has become an issue these past few years, and part of that is down to interconnected movies and TV shows that make it tough to keep up with what’s happening in overarching storylines.

Multiverse madness meant it was tough to keep up with movies like Doctor Strange 2, Ant-Man 3, and The Marvels in the MCU unless you’d seen all the TV spinoffs. While DC’s new Penguin serves as something of a prequel to The Batman 2.

Mercifully, this Hellboy movie isn’t concerned with all that outside noise. Instead it tells a self-contained story, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Which means that The Crooked Man doesn’t waste time setting up characters for future instalments, or crafting storylines that will pay off it future films rather than the here-and-now.

It feels like a throwback to a less cynical time, and this old-fashioned approach is something the genre should learn from if superheroes want to start shaking off that fatigue.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is in cinemas now. For more comic book action, this is our list of the best superhero movies of all-time. While these are comic book movies you might never see, for some pretty surprising reasons.