Spawn creator Todd McFarlane has offered another update on his long-gestating big screen adaptation of Spawn. McFarlane has been working with Blumhouse on this project for years, but if Blumhouse can’t get the movie made this year, McFarlane is ready to move forward on the project independently.
While talking to CB, the creator of Spawn said:
“Something’s gotta happen. Something’s gonna happen. I just know myself, something’s gonna happen ’cause if I can’t figure it out inside [the Hollywood system], I’ll figure it out [independently]. I just know myself. But hopefully, we can figure out a deal that keeps all the parties that have been involved over the years involved.
“2024 is gonna be my make or break anyways, right? Either I’m gonna give Hollywood the best chance to do it and, if not, I’ve got plenty of outside investors waiting.
“So, I’m trying to see if we can make the right deal within the norm of the Hollywood structure. If not, there have been plenty of examples, actually, a couple big ones last year, where people went outside the normal channels and succeeded. People have done this before with independent movies: you make your movie and you just find a distributor. That one, I could do in a heartbeat.”
I’m pretty sure that if Blumhouse can’t get Spawn off the ground, McFarlane is going to have a rough go at it trying to do it independently. Unless he puts his own money into it to fund it himself, it will take him another ten years to get the movie made.
As you know, right now audiences are in a state of superhero fatigue and with superhero comic book movies having a rough time at the box office, I can see why investors might be wary of a Spawn movie. at the same time, this film is going to have a much lower budget than the other movies that Marvel and DC are making, so there’s a better chance for it to make a big profit. Also, Spawn is a lot different than those other movies. McFarlane previously talked about Superhero Fatigue saying:
“I think there’s a couple of things. The quality of any film, any genre [is important]. People say ‘I can’t sell a Western movie.’ Of course, you can. You can’t sell a bad Western movie. And then your marketing. If you put it in a bad time up against 10 other movies people want to go see, it’s going to get buried, right? So you’ve got that. And then just sort of gauging whether people are in the mood for that genre more than another one. Sometimes rom-coms become sort of the flavor of the month for a while or whatever else.
“But I put superhero movies in the same category as action movies. They’re just action movies and action movies have been around forever, right? Van Damme. Schwarzenegger. Stallone. Seagal. This is just an extension of it. So, yes, at some point, if some of those action movies got cheesy and they went to the well too often, we’d move on. But then all of a sudden, you know, The Matrix comes along or some other new one and we go, ‘Oh my God, there it is.’ So somebody is going to figure it out. I mean, again, I don’t think [there’s superhero fatigue]. It’s like saying that there’s been too many baseball games played and we have baseball fatigue. No. Just give me a good team that I can root for and make it worth my money and I’ll come.”
The Spawn creator went on to say, “It’s going to be edgy and original as compared to other superhero movies. It’s gonna definitely feel like the Blumhouse version of a superhero movie.”
Producer Jason Blum has said that Spawn will be released in 2025, so the movie will need to start production sometime this year. There have been several drafts of a script written over the years, the most recent version was developed by Scott Silver, Malcolm Spellman, and Matthew Mixon. Blumhouse promised McFarlane that he will get to read the completed script this month.
The movie has previously been described as “Spawn meets David Fincher” and a “gritty” and “dirty thing.” When previously talking about his take on the story, McFarlane explained: “There’s two big roles in the script. There’s obviously sort of Spawn himself, although in a weird way it’s not the biggest role, and then there’s the cop. The cop is this character Twitch who’s been there since issue #1. Twitch is the role in this one, and I sort of refer to him as my sheriff Brody, who is the sheriff in the Jaws movie. Although it was called Jaws, Jaws didn’t really talk a lot in his movie, right? He just kind of showed up at the opportune time to make the movie worthwhile.”
McFarlane previously confirmed that the movie will be rated R and that the script he’s written is “scary and “badass.” He’s described Spawn as the Jaws of the movie, saying: “The world’s going to be real, except for one thing that’s going to move. You’re never going to see a dude in a rubber suit….This is going to be my Jaws shark.”
