A Hellboy Sequel? Ape Sapien Ending Cameo Explained

The franchise might be rebooted, but Red and Blue are back. Sort of

Full spoilers continue below for Hellboy! Check out IGN's review of Hellboy here.

The rebooted Hellboy may be pretty unfamiliar territory for fans of Del Toro's original duology -- not just because this new R-rated take on the character relishes in all the gore and profanity it can possibly fit into a 120-minute runtime, but because the ensemble cast around Hellboy himself has been dramatically shuffled around. Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien have been swapped out for Alice Monaghan and Ben Daimio -- at least, for now.

The final scene of the movie actually allues to a pretty major arrival, should a sequel happen any time soon -- and it goes a little something like this.

Six months after the events in England, Alice, Hellboy, and Ben are working as a team for the BPRD, investigating what they call the "Oannes Society," yet another one of the world's Illuminati-esque occult organizations. There isn't much in the way of context for the scene -- the trio simply seems to need to kill everyone in the base for whatever reason. And that's exactly what they do, at least until they reach what looks like some sort of storage facility.

Here, they find a glass tube filled with water with a plaque bolted to the bottom that reads "Ichthyo Sapien." As they lean in to try and figure out what could have been inside, a webbed hand slaps against the glass.

Say hello to your new Abe Sapien -- or, at least to his arm.

The scene cuts in that moment leaving the meet-cute on a major cliffhanger, but there's enough of Abe's history over in the comics for us to start making some connections on our own. Namely, this version of Abe seems to be much more faithful to the source material than Del Toro's original -- the Oannes Society is a direct pull from Abe's comic origins which are... well, pretty weird.

In the comics, Abe was actually a human man named Langdon Everett Caul who, back in the Victorian era, worked as a scientist with some unsavory occult interests. Caul became involved with the Oannes Society who believed that the key to understanding all life on Earth was tied to the sea -- but not in a purely scientific way. Think less microorganisms and evolution and more Lovecraftian ocean gods.

The Oannes Society performed an arcane ritual to a jellyfish "god" they discovered in some aquatic ruins that may or may not have been Atlantis which resulted in Caul being transformed into -- you guessed it -- an Ichthyo Sapien. The transformation was not instantaneous, however, and the Society was left with an unconscious, slowly mutating Caul which they stored in a glass tube filled with water in one of their underground bases where they would wait out Caul's "rebirth" into an aquatic god creature.

Unfortunately -- or very fortunately, depending on who's side your own -- that's not what happened. The Oannes Society collapsed and the BPRD eventually uncovered Caul (now Abe) awakening him from his long stasis as the Abe Sapien we know and love today with no memory of his past life as a human.

Obviously, that's a lot of information to be inferred from just one brief scene in the movie, and there are certainly some marked differences from the source material already. Namely, in this new movie universe, Abe is found by the team in modern day (he was found in the '70s in the comics), never has a chance to meet the already dead Dr. Broom, and may or may not wind up working for the Bureau at all. It's far too early to say.

But, at the very least, we can rest easy knowing that Abe does exist in this new franchise and, though he may not be played by Doug Jones and David Hyde Pierce this time around, at least he won't be totally forgotten.

Meg Downey is a freelance writer for IGN. You can check out her review of Hellboy here. Follow Meg on Twitter at @RustyPolished!

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