Todd McFarlane Explains SPAWN Screenwriter Isn't Satisfied with The Script and Calls Him "Fearless"

Todd McFarlane’s new Spawn movie is still in development at Blumhouse, and we have another update to share with you on where the project currently stands.

This movie has been in development for so long, but McFarlane feels "more confident now" that it’s actually going to happen than at any other point in the process, but the script still isn’t ready.

The movie is being written by Joker and The Fighter writer Scott Silver, and apparently, he’s not satisfied with the script that has been written and they are still trying to perfect it. The other writers include Malcolm Spellman (Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Captain America: New World Order), and rising scribe Matt Mixon.

McFarlane explained in an interview with CB: "There's a script but the writers are, they're not quite sort of satisfied with their own work, which is what all of us creative people are.

“We put it on paper and then we criticize ourselves. So they're going through sort of an extensive sort of rework and rewrite of it. I was just on the phone a couple of days ago with Scott Silver, the guy who's sort of manning the lead of it right now.

“He's also the writer of Joker and Joker 2. We're all planning and hoping and moving towards having this done so that we can take it out so that we can find our studio finally pre-Joker 2 launch, which comes in October."

It sounds like they’re very close to completing the script, and it’s going to be a miracle if the project actually goes into production one day. The creative team just wants to makes sure the story they tell is in perfect working order.

McFarlane went on to talk about some of the intense storytelling conversations that he’s had with Silver, calling him fearless. Silver is pushing for an ending to the story that will "have some meaning and some purpose, not just that the good guy won."

He said: "I wish everybody could hear the conversation because he is so impassioned about what he's talking about. He is so engrossed in what he's doing...It's not like he's just like, I'm just trying to get it done. It's just not a good guy versus bad guy story...

“He said the other day, 'I'd rather take a swing and it be too big of a swing then to not take a hard enough swing at it....He's kind of fearless and he doesn't want to replicate what he knows is sort of the safe, probably predictable path that most people would go because it's the proven path, right?

“Just wants to bend it. He wants it because we're gonna do R rated and we're gonna do it and it can't be mini-Marvel and mini-DC. It can't."

When previously talking about Silver’s work on the movie, McFarlane said: “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. 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 went on to say that Silver is looking to tell a dangerous story, saying: “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 see.

“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.”

Producer Jason Blum previously talked about the film, saying: “Yes, I’m going to bring the Blumhouse edge [to the Spawn movie]. It’s going to be edgy and original as compared to other superhero movies. It’s gonna definitely feel like the Blumhouse version of a superhero movie.”

In the comics, Spawn is a former black-ops agent who makes a deal with a demon after being betrayed and killed. The demon allows him to return to Earth, but when he returns, five years have passed, his wife has moved on, and he roams Earth as a disfigured spawn of hell.

The movie has previously been described as “Spawn meets David Fincher” and a “gritty” and “dirty thing.” When previously talking about his take on the story, McFarlane 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."

McFarlane previously confirmed that the movie will be rated R and that the script he's written is "scary and "badass." He’s described Spawn as the Jaws of the movie, saying: "The world's going to be real, except for one thing that's going to move. You're never going to see a dude in a rubber suit....This is going to be my Jaws shark." 

I hope they actually pull this off and end up making a great freakin’ Spawn movie!