I always hoped that I’d get to see Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. He promised a genuinely exciting take on the character and lined up Jamie Foxx and Jeremy Renner for roles in the film. For the last two years, he’s been battling to get the pic greenlit by a major studio, though it seems like it’s been an uphill battle.
Things looked very promising after the success of Joker, which apparently had studios eager for their own R-rated comic book movie to replicate its success. McFarlane even assured us that Spawn would definitely be shot by the end of the year. Then came the Coronavirus pandemic, which lobbed a grenade into every major studio’s plans for 2020.
With damn near every big release being delayed and studios likely planning to play it safe for the foreseeable future, it seems that Spawn may have missed its window of opportunity. In fact, McFarlane sounded uncharacteristically downbeat in a recent interview with Forbes, for the first time conceding that the movie might not happen anymore and explaining that:
“I wrote the first draft of the screenplay. If I’d done my job and written a screenplay that mattered, that would have sold it. I’m culpable on that end to start with. That’s why I went to get Jason Blum to produce, and attached Jamie [Foxx ]and Jeremy [Renner] – to add the quality to it. My goal is to continue to add those kind of quality people at all levels. The more I can add those people, the less I become relevant as a risk.”
McFarlane has famously insisted that he direct Spawn himself, which would be his first time getting behind the camera. His argument was that he’d minimize the “risk” of this by surrounding himself with “quality people.” But sadly that factor, and what he considers to be the failings of his own screenplay, seem to be what’s scuppered the movie.
Though McFarlane sounds pretty down on the pic, it also doesn’t sound like it’s totally dead. He’s still on the hunt for new talent to work on it and hopefully he’ll find a way to make this long in-gestation production a reality.