Spawn creator Todd McFarlane recently shared that the upcoming movie reboot will not take any pages from the Marvel playbook.
Speaking with Screen Rant, McFarlane explained that he wants Spawn to be unlike any superhero movie currently being made in Hollywood. He also praised Joker screenwriter Scott Silver, who is currently working on the Spawn reboot script with Malcolm Spellman and Matthew Mixon, for being able to see that Spawn is not an ordinary hero.
“The one thing that I’m excited about in my conversations, and mostly with Scott Silver, is that he is just hell-bent – and don’t say that as a pun, literally – of wanting to do something different. Every conversation, he just is like, ‘We just can’t do Marvel lite.’ He doesn’t want to do horror because that is its own thing,” McFarlane explained. “He’s just fighting to try and see if we can do something slightly different. … I’ve always said when you try to do something different, you let the audience decide whether that’s better or worse, right? They’re the paying customer.”
McFarlane continued, “But he said something to me the other day that I thought was almost perfect. He said, ‘I want to do a story that’s dangerous.’ And he didn’t mean it in that there’s danger in the story, per se. He meant that it would be a little bit of a risk to do this movie because it’s not going to fall into an easy formula, and I’m all for that. I’m all for trying something different – in his word, dangerous. That’s music to my ears.”
Spawn is getting rebooted for the big screen
Spawn was first adapted to film in 1997 with Michael Jai White playing the title role of Al Simmons, a murdered US Marine who is resurrected as the reluctant leader of Hell’s army, Spawn. Although the film was critically panned, it was a moderate box office success, grossing $87.9 million from a budget of $45 million. A sequel was planned but never made it out of development.
McFarlane began working on a reboot as early as 2013, with Blumhouse joining the project in 2017. Jamie Foxx, who portrayed Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man: No Way Home, signed on to play the title character in 2018 and was still attached to the project as recently as 2023. While no production timeline has been set, McFarlane previously revealed that he will “go to outside investors notable progress isn’t made on the movie in the coming year.”
No release date has been set for Spawn, although Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum has teased a 2025 release window.
