For the longest time, it looked certain that Todd McFarlane’s Spawn reboot would never see the warm light of day – that is, until the casting of Jamie Foxx as Albert “Al” Simmons.
Foxx’s addition was undoubtedly a major coup for the long-gestating project – ditto for Avengers: Endgame‘s Jeremy Renner, who signed on shortly thereafter in a supporting role – but as McFarlane himself tells ComicBook.com, there are many challenges still facing his Spawn movie before it reaches the big screen.
As a matter of fact, the R-rated pic is still languishing in the early stages of development, and much of that comes down to McFarlane’s reluctance to compromise. Put simply, the writer-director hasn’t entertained the possibility of changing his vision too much, otherwise he’ll walk away from Spawn entirely.
Yep. About the same spot. 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.
This is by no means the first time that McFarlane has provided a status report on Spawn – nor is it likely to be the last – but as part of his candid chat with ComicBook.com, the comic book scribe went on to describe a dream scenario in which his long-awaited passion project finally gets the green light from either Sony, Universal, Paramount or any other studio that displays an interest.
Here’s how it would work, is that let’s say even we had let’s say, three studios, right? Let’s just pick three. So we got Sony. I’m gonna make it all up. Sony, Universal, Paramount, the ones that don’t have Marvel and DC. They should hopefully be more interested. Even if they all showed interest at the same time, our questions are gonna be, ‘Well, what kind of marketing campaign are you gonna do with it?’ And then number two, ‘What are your slots that you have?’ Right? And so, some of them may say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this campaign, and we’ve got this slot.’ We think it would be better, but you have to wait another three, four, five months till we got the opening that we think is right. And somebody else might say, ‘Hey, we can go sooner than that, but maybe we’re not gonna pour as much into advertising.’ And we’ll just have to weigh those variables, and then go, ‘Which one do we think makes the most sense for the project’s success as a whole?’
Of course, we know that Blumhouse has already committed to distribution duties, so at the very least, Spawn has that base covered. All that’s left now is for McFarlane and his creative team to settle on a script, before that all-important release date is locked in. The man himself recently proposed a Halloween launch for Al Simmons, but much like all the other finer details, we’ll have to wait and see whether that comes to pass.