Todd McFarlane Gives Update on His SPAWN Movie and Says He'll Walk Away If He Has to Change The Script Too Much

It’s been awhile since we’ve gotten an update on Todd McFarlane’s new Spawn movie. He’s been developing this thing for over a decade! Then he finally got a studio and producer to back him with Blumhouse Pictures. Shortly after it was announced that Jaimie Foxx would be taking on the role of Spawn and Jeremy Renner would take on the role of Detective Twitch.

Well, in a recent update from McFarlane himself, it sounds like he’s having issues trying to convince people to make the film that he wants to make. He also says that if he has to change his script too much, he’ll walk away from it. Here’s what he told CB:

“The money’s sitting on the sidelines ready to go. I just need to get everyone that wants to put in money to shake their heads to the same script. As you can imagine, everyone has a slightly different version of it in their head. You just go and trying to appease a handful of people while not giving in to what it is that I’m trying to do myself. Because if I have to change it too much, I’ll just walk away from it all.”

Well, that doesn’t sound good. But, in the end, McFarlane is fine and he really doesn’t need to make this movie. It’s not going to make or break him, it’s just a cool think that he would love to do if everything works out. He certainly doesn’t need the money!

I would love to see this movie get made, and thankfully it’s still not dead, so that’s a plus! I love the direction that McFarlane is taking 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:

"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."

McFarlane also explained that the movie will have no joy. Instead it will be a “dark” and “ugly” film:

“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.”

The movie was supposed to be released in June of 2019, but that’s obviously not going to happen now.