“Hellboy,” the demonic* comic book hero-turned Guillermo del Toro film franchise, is poised to return to the big-screen, this time without the filmmaker at the helm.

Millennium is in negotiations with producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin for a new installment that would reboot and relaunch* the property. Dark Horse Entertainment is also producing.

Neil Marshall, the horror director who broke out with “The Descent” and won raves* for his work on “Game of Thrones,” is in talks to direct the project, which has a working title of “Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen” and has a script by Andrew Cosby, Christopher Golden and “Hellboy” creator Mike Mignola. Del Toro is not involved nor is Ron Perlman, the actor who inhabited the red-skinned cigar-chomping devil in the two previous installments.

Rather, David Harbour, the “Stranger Things” star, is in talks to play “Hellboy.”

If a deal makes, Millennium would become the third company to make a “Hellboy” movie in as many releases.

“Hellboy” was created in 1993 by Mignola and became an indie* comic hit as it told of a demon raised by a professor, working to fight supernatural* evildoers* for an organization called Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

Del Toro co-wrote and directed the first adaptation, which was made by Revolution Studios and released by Sony in 2004. The movie made US$60 million domestic (another US$40 internationally asterisked that this was the era before international box office dominated performance) on a budget of US$66 million.

The second movie was made by Universal with the same team — del Toro and Perlman — but its box office mojo was cut short when “The Dark Knight,” directed by Christopher Nolan and featuring Heath Ledger as the Joker, opened six days later.

But both movies engendered strong cult followings and there were rumblings* of a third installment.

(SD-Agencies)