Todd McFarlane's SPAWN Movie Was Only 30 Pages Away From Being Finished Before The Writers' Strike
Todd McFarlane has been working on getting a new Spawn movie off the ground for over a decade. A lot of fans have given up on it, but the project has been in development at Blumhouse for a few years, and it’s one of those projects that producer Jason Blum doesn’t seem to be giving up on.
There have been several drafts of a script written over the years, the more recent versions were worked on by Scott Silver, Malcolm Spellman, and Matthew Mixon. During an interview with CB, McFarlane offered an update on the most recent version of the script saying that it was only 30 pages away from being finished before the writers’ strike hit. He said:
"We were in the middle of writing the script and then the writers strike came. So that basically came to a screeching halt, if you will. But they were pretty far along in it, so I'm assuming that they've given it a lot of thought during the strike. They know what they're going to write, the last 30 pages, which is all they need to finish. And so as soon as the strike's over, I'm assuming they're going to quickly finish that up. We will do some rewrites. We'll go into Hollywood. We'll find a buyer, maybe we'll find a couple of buyers, get into a bidding war. And then we'll come back out and make the announcement that says, 'We've got the funding, the studio, and the production date all lined up. It's go time.'"
It seems like the script has always been 30 pages away from being finished. McFarlane went on to say:
"We were hoping, minus the strike, that was going to happen this summer, at the latest, this fall. That we would be able to, in a perfect world, I was going to have the movie and the Call of Duty news at New York Comic Con. And there would just be a one, two, and we would've owned the news cycle at New York Comic Con. But Spawn coming in Call of Duty is going to be a giant piece anyways on its own. And it's just, hopefully, in quick order, if we can follow it up with some movie noise, then it will just keep the ball rolling."
Jamie Foxx is still attached to the film after all these years. A few months ago Jason Blum said the film is in "very, very active development,” and he hoped the movie would be released in 2025. McFarlane previously said that it’s now or never to get his movie made, and explained:
"Something's going to give in the next few months, right? There's too many people pushing in that direction, again I've got a call later today on that very subject. You can imagine Spider-Man makes a billion dollars and everybody sort of gets sort of... I mean they were already crazy, now they just got twice as crazy. I mean they got crazy when the only movies that were making money were superheroes, and then Venom goes and rocks it, and then Spider-Man comes in and obliterates it, so now they're almost singular in their mindset of what kind of ideas they've got. So something has to happen. We'll never get to the top of the mountain if we can't do it now, with everybody wanting to do it now. Fingers crossed. I would say it's now or never."
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."
Producer Jason Blum also previously said of the project: “What excited me about it is that Spawn is kind of the last great unexploited comic. So that seemed like an amazing opportunity. It’s taken longer than I hoped it would have to get the story right, but we’re still working on it." Blum also said that the reboot is “gonna be very different, it’s gonna be very edgy."
Maybe one day this Spawn movie will get made. But right now, there’s no movement on it because of the strikes.