Spawn creator, Todd McFarlane has been talking (seemingly forever) about a live-action sequel or reboot of the 1997 Spawn film, which he intends to write, produce and direct himself. About a year ago McFarlane said, “I’m 80% through the script, I did my due diligence, went around Hollywood,…I listened to the pitch from all the big studios, but I just went, ‘nah, I need to make this small and tight and contained. And if we keep the budget small, they’ll allow me to do all of that. [But] if you blow up the budget…and I understand that. I wouldn’t hire me, either. But then I have to give it away.”
McFarlane later went on to say,
“At this point in my life, I’d rather keep it smaller and maybe get fewer people to come see it, but actually just sort of extract out of my brain what I’ve been living with for the past 10 years. Another option is me just financing it myself, That way I can just … I own all of it.”
In a recent interview, McFarlane spoke with the LATimes and re-hashed some of what he’s already said, and expanded upon it by telling us what his pitch to studios is for the film:
“One of the things that happened is after the first movie came out I started the toy company and sort of got distracted. But these days, as you might imagine, with the [Hollywood] success of Batman and Spider-Man and some of the Marvel titles, everybody’s on a comic-book buying binge and the phone constantly rings. My attitude toward it is I can’t get my head wrapped around some big special-effects movie with a supervillain in there. There will be plenty of those and they’ve done pretty well. I’ve always seen Spawn as being cut from a different cloth. It’s more of an urban, psychological story that’s being told. The answer I’ve given the last few years is that Spawn should be a small-budget movie in which the only thing that’s out of the ordinary is this thing that intellectually we know as Spawn and there would only be a handful of people that see it. I call it “it” because it never talks, it’s just a force of nature. Really, the story revolves around the people who are trying to decide: “Is the ghost alive? Is the shadow actually moving?” When I give that pitch, some of the executives scratch their heads. To a lot of people, a movie where the [title] character doesn’t talk doesn’t make any sense. There have been a few movies like that. “Alien,” you know, that guy didn’t say much. Or ” Jaws,” the shark didn’t have too many speaking lines. “Jaws” is the closest example, the movie wasn’t about the shark, it’s about the people chasing the shark.”
McFarlane went on to detail the pitch, and compare and contrast Spawn with Batman:
“The idea I pitch is that the movie shouldn’t be about superheroes and laser beams – it’s about the id of people and the group of people caught up in the story and seeing things out of the corner of their eye. And when I give the pitch, I also say that I will write and direct it. There’s the nonnegotiable pieces of it. Then I have four suitors who say, “Yeah, cool, when do we start?” It means we’re not looking for a $20-million actor and we’re not looking for a big-budget extravaganza with lots of special effects. The story that I pitch is very tight, very contained, but done right. I want a movie that gets people’s hearts racing. I want to scare them. Spawn, done right, is a creepy character. Instead of a superhero who just stands there. That’s why Batman was always the coolest of all the good guys. I never had one moment of affinity for [Superman]. He was a Boy Scout right from the moment he hit the ground. He was always polite and said the right thing. I never felt like he was in danger because he could spin planets on his finger. Batman is a guy who could die if you threw him out of a window. More than that, even though he had women throwing themselves at him and millions of dollars, all he wanted to do was to wait until 3 a.m. and the pitch of black and say, “time to put the costume on and scare the bad guys.” I relate way more to that guy. Spawn is Batman untethered, without the corporation behind it. Batman without limits, Batman who kills the Joker.
Comparing Spawn to Batman, and the story to Jaws, immediately conjured up two images in my mind…
The Untitled Spawn Reboot might hit theaters in 2013 (or not).
