As Todd McFarlane continues with pre-production on his big screen reboot of Spawn, the creator has been chatting to Comic Book about redesigning the comic book character’s classic look for his second feature film appearance.
“Does Spawn have a dark mask and his body dark and then does he have a cape in the comic books? Yes, yes, yes. Will he have all of that in the movie? Yes, yes, yes,” states McFarlane. “So it’s not like I’m going to give him wings instead of a cape and I’m not going to give him no mask instead of a mask. There’s no going to be any of that. It just won’t be exactly what a hardcore fan is used to. But I’m hoping that people who just go and are familiar with Spawn will say, ‘Yeah, it’s in the box.’ And people who know nothing about Spawn will go, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ And I have to design for film goers not for comic book fans because the film goers are going to be bigger than the pool of the comic book fans.”
Meanwhile, McFarlane has also revealed that he has enlisted special effects artist Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead) to help realise the character, with Nicotero having previously worked on the 1997 movie starring Michael Jai White.
“I’m a long-time fan of Greg’s work and the projects his company, KNB have done throughout the years,” said McFarlane. “Working with him once again, to re-invent the Spawn ‘look’ so it will match the supernatural theme in the movie, is going to be a fun process. When I conceived of the story to start with, I never really thought of it as big special effects extravaganza because I knew we weren’t going to have the budget for it. So I knew I was going to rely heavily on practical makeup and costuming, and one of the places that kept popping up was my good pal Greg Nicotero on his KNB Group. And he’s obviously done a tremendous amount of work on dozens and dozens of movies. The sort of serendipitous part of it is that Greg was there at the beginning 20 years ago for the original Spawn movie.”
McFarlane will direct the new Spawn movie from Blumhouse Pictures, with Jamie Foxx starring as the title character and Jeremy Renner cast in the role of Twitch Williams. Production on the film is expected to get underway early in the new year.
