Every six months or so, comic book creator Todd McFarlane pops up to update the status of the long-gestating Spawn reboot, generally stating that he’s working on the script and has Oscar-winning actors interested in appearing. Well, he’s been at it again this week, offering up a little more details about the tone and proposed budget for the movie, before slipping back into familiar territory with regards to casting.
“I’m hoping to have the script done hopefully in the next couple of months,” McFarlane tells Assignment X. “I’ve talked to a couple of producers – can we get shooting by the end of the year if I can get that script in good order? But it’s a complete reboot. It’s a ten-million-dollar, R-rated supernatural movie that takes all the superhero stuff out of it. So for people who want to go see an Iron Man redo, that’s not it. For people who like The Conjuring, then it’s going to be right up that alley. Not ‘horror’. Because that’s a weird word, right? Supernatural thriller. I grew up on things like Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, things like that. Those movies only had one fantastic element in [them], and it was the supernatural or the ghost, and everything else in the world was normal. With superheroes, you have to have the hero, the super-villain, the fantastic headquarters, sometimes even the sidekick and you get more and more fantastic. This is just going to be The Departed and L.A. Confidential with a ghost moving around in it.”
And as for casting, McFarlane went on to admit that he’s spoke to Jamie Foxx (The Amazing Spider-Man 2), with Foxx having previously expressed his desire to star in the lead role: “Jamie was out at my office. I thought we were going to keep it on the q.t. I’ve talked to some pretty high-profile actors. I think he’s just putting the pressure on me to get the script done. So I sold him on my pitch. I go, ‘Here, I’ve got an idea that could keep you in the Spawn movies for twenty years, but it can’t be about physicality. It has to be more about a little bit of acting and then this specter, this sentinel, that moves around in an otherwise hard drama movie.'”
Considering how long McFarlane has been working on the reboot, it could be twenty years before we see Spawn back on the big screen at this rate….
Originally published October 11, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
