Can Todd McFarlane Get Spawn Made? 

With a lack of movie updates coming due to the ongoing pandemic, sometimes it’s nice to go back and take a look at some movies in pre-production. Like Spawn.

Spawn #1 came on the scene back in May of 1992 and immediately caught on with fans with sales of 1.7 million copies.

Created by Todd McFarlane the series went on to massive popularity while being ranked 60th on Wizard (RIP) magazine’s list of the Top 200 Comic Book Characters of All Time, 50th on Empire magazine’s list of The 50 Greatest Comic Book Characters, and 36th on IGN’s 2011 Top 100 Comic Book Heroes.

Not surprisingly a movie was green lit and Spawn was released in August of 1997 and grossed $87 million worldwide against its production budget of $45 million. Reviews weren’t good but the movie went on to gain a little cult status.

Now, the HBO animated series is awesome but that’s not what we’re talking about today.

We’re talking about the reboot.

In an interview with Inverse, producer Jason Blum gave an update on the project saying that they’re still actively pursuing the project, and as of right now, they are taking their time to get the script right saying, “What excited me about it is that Spawn is kind of the last great unexploited comic. So that seemed like an amazing opportunity. It’s taken longer than I hoped it would have to get the story right, but we’re still working on it.”

Blum promised the reboot is “gonna be very different, it’s gonna be very edgy.” I really do hope that this movie is worth the wait. As a longtime fan of the comic, I’ve been wanting to see a proper Spawn movie get made, and I really hope that this is gonna be it.

Last year McFarlane spoke with Comic Book.com’s Talking Shop and revealed the Spawn reboot is still very much alive but not everyone involved is in agreement on the script.

“The money’s sitting on the sidelines ready to go,” McFarland said. “I just need to get everyone that wants to put in money to shake their heads to the same script. As you can imagine, everyone has a slightly different version of it in their head. You just go and trying to appease a handful of people while not giving in to what it is that I’m trying to do myself. Because if I have to change it too much, I’ll just walk away from it all.”

As you can imagine, fans don’t like hearing that last sentence. McFarlane is signed on to write and direct the Spawn reboot, which he has gone on record to say that it will be “dark and R-rated,” even going so far as to say that it would be a harder R than Deadpool.

McFarlane also revealed that the budget for the film will be a rather humble $10-to-$12 million, which isn’t very big for a superhero movie. The project has some big players already signed up with Jamie Foxx onboard to star in the movie alongside Jeremy Renner.

With the continued surge of superhero movies and their success at the box office, the time is ripe for more independent options to make the jump to the big screen.

Spawn especially. It’s a different concept that’s familiar enough for audiences to bond with but has enough of a twist to deliver fresh concepts.

McFarlane has also said, “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.”

As a fan of the comic book I wouldn’t be adverse to seeing this be made into a limited series TV show, giving them the opportunity to delve into the character and the universe they inhabit. 

As far as a movie, here’s to hoping. 

What do you think about the Spawn reboot?