No, Jamie Foxx Has Not Dropped Out of Todd McFarlane's SPAWN Movie
Rumors are spreading like wildfire across the internet right now that Jamie Foxx has dropped out of the R-Rated Spawn movie that Todd McFarlane has been developing and trying to get off the ground. The rumor was sparked by a comment that McFarlane made during an interview with Shoryuken. He said:
“Last week I got some discouraging news, we had an Academy Award-winning guy who was going to do the movie with us, but he fell off. We had people willing to fund the movie as long as we had this guy attached but schedules were conflicting, and things had to change. That’s how close we are to getting this thing off the ground.”
It was immediately believed that the “Academy Award-winning guy” was Foxx. Well, it’s not. Foxx is still attached to the project. It has been discovered that the Academy Award-winning person was actually a writer helping him polish the script for the film, and according to CB, McFarlane has now moved on to approaching another award-winning writer to replace them. We don’t know who these writers are, but all that matters is that Foxx is still set to play Spawn. Jeremy Renner is also attached to the film and will be taking on the role of Twitch.
McFarlane went on to talk about the progression on his Spawn movie and while speaking at the Fan Expo Vancouver, McFarlane attributed R-rated movies such as Deadpool as well as the success of Joker for the forward momentum:
"Everybody in Hollywood wants an R-rated, dark comic book movie, and Spawn is at the top of their list. The phone calls are coming in fast and rapid. I've been talking to a couple of Academy Award people, I've got the investors getting lined up. It's changed ever since the Joker from being me begging them to do Spawn dark and creepy, to them asking."
McFarlane is so confident in his project that he says it will happen this year:
"So I'm telling you it will happen this year. This year. And I will direct it. I will be directing it."
We also have this update from McFarlane:
When previously talking about the tone of the movie, the director promised that there would be “no joy,” and explained:
“There’s gonna be no fun lines in it, and it’s just gonna be this dark, ugly two hours worth of movie, which is essentially what a lot of supernatural/horror movies are anyway. There’s not a lot of funny in them. And that seems to be a weird hurdle for a lot of people in this city to get over because they sort of go into a superhero/Avengers default all the time.”
McFarlane went on to say that this Spawn film is going to be a serious R-rated, scary, creepy movie:
“My bent for what I want to do with Spawn is a lot more serious, and a lot more dark, than what people are seeing traditionally in PG-13 superhero movies. It’s just going to be a dead-serious, R-rated, scary, creepy movie. Done, period, and I’m not wavering from that. And if at some point they just go, ‘No, the only way this gets made is if we convert that,’ then we’re never gonna make it. I’ll go and beg, borrow, and steal the money, I’ll get it made. Don’t worry, I’ll get it made.”
Well, I’m happy to see he’s determined and I hope this movie actually happens one day. I’ve been really curious to see his vision for it brought to life. When talking about his take on the story, he previously 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."
He went on to elaborate on how his Spawn movie compares to Jaws, saying:
"It was sheriff Brody, the humans talking, chasing the fantastical thing that sort of made the movie, and to me, there's that element. Everything else is normal in this story other than (gesture) the shadow moves, and at times even when it moves, the cop just sort of thinks he's losing his mind so he doesn't even trust that the shadow's moving. If you're a bad guy, then this thing is going to come and it's going to get you."
He also said that Spawn himself won't talk in the movie. He'll just be this thing lurking in the shadows. When talking about the dynamic between the two main characters in the film, he said:
"Spawn is King Arthur and Twitch is Sir Lancelot, and this isn’t about physicality, or jumping over buildings. This is more a brawn and brain combination, and the first film I think of with him is The Hurt Locker, the army grunt doing the job, and that spilled out into all these roles leading up to Wind River. There was a sense of melancholy to that character that is important and that was a movie also made by a first time director, but one who wrote the thing and so wasn’t nervous about trying to get what you want. Jeremy had the experience of working with the first timer and saw that if you put a good crew together, the whole is way better than the parts and you don’t have to worry."
I’m actually looking forward to this movie. I’ve been a fan of Spawn since I read the first issue of the comic back in the 90s and I’m curious to see how McFarlane’s Spawn movie will turn out. This film project has been in the works forever, but it looks like it’s actually going to get made… eventually.