It’s the fabled reboot that has been circling the jaws of development hell for years, but finally – finally! – a Spawn reboot is beginning to come together under the watchful eye of Todd McFarlane.
Not only is McFarlane well versed in the horror-fantasy source material – he’s illustrated multiple comic book issues featuring the titular anti-hero and even fostered the development of an animated series, aptly titled Todd McFarlane’s Spawn – but for this “dark” and “nasty” live-action adaptation, he’s joined forces with Blumhouse Productions.
From The Purge to Get Out to M. Night Shyamalan’s Split – not to mention that much-touted threequel Glass – Blumhouse has built a remarkable body of work over the past decade, and is far and away one of Hollywood’s most prolific studios when it comes to low-budget, and often R-rated, horror pics. It’s no wonder this collaboration between Todd McFarlane and Blumhouse has been championed as a match made in heaven, and while chatting to ComicBook.com, the former outlined the ways in which this partnership will ultimately inform and indeed benefit the Spawn reboot.
After drawing attention to Blumhouse’s M.O. – an M.O. that fosters “R-rated, low budget, scary, [and] cool movies” – Todd McFarlane dubbed Spawn to be a “dark supernatural thriller,” which aligns with his previous comments about how the film will compare to Jaws in the sense that the titular monster won’t have as much screen time as you’d expect.
Jason’s brand with Blumhouse Productions has been these R-rated, low budget, scary, cool movies that are successful, and they work, and they allow you then to make another movie. The thought was always, and I never moved off it, was that I’d write, produce, and direct, which I will…So now I needed to surround myself with people that were going to make me look good and one of the first steps is to get a good production house, and it sounds silly what I’m about to say, that can make a low budget movie.
“Big studios have such a high overhead that the moment you walk in the door they go, ‘We can’t make anything under $24 million’. It’s just going to be this dark, gritty world, and there’s going to be one thing in the entire world that is fantastic and it’s going to be Spawn. I’d call it a dark supernatural thriller.
It’s found a home at Blumhouse Productions and seemingly held talks with Oscar-winning talent; now all that’s left is for Spawn to enter production in earnest. Granted, it’s still early days for McFarlane’s adaptation, but everything we’ve learned so far stinks of potential.