Kirsten Howard

Jul 13, 2017

Todd McFarlane won't let the Spawn reboot move forward unless he can "write, produce, direct, non-negotiable"….

While we’ve still got the TV series to keep us warm at night (it holds up pretty well) many fans justifiably feel like they’ve been denied the Spawn movie they deserve, and creator Todd McFarlane wants them all to know that he definitely hasn’t given up on that long-in-gestation reboot film.

Previously, when chatting to comicbook.com about the state of the project, he confirmed that he had finished a new “hard R” Spawn movie script.

“I’d put it more into the horror/suspense/supernatural genre”, McFarlane said at the time. “If you take the movie The Departed meets Paranormal Activity, something like that…In the background, there’s this thing moving around, this boogeyman. That boogeyman just happens to be something that you and I, intellectually, know is Spawn. Will he look like he did in the first movie? No. Will he have a supervillain he fights? No. He’s going to be the specter, the ghost.”

He added that, “I want to keep it small, keep it tight, so they’ll let me direct it”.

Well, fast forward 17 months and there’s been very little progress it seems. Speaking with SyFy Wire recently, McFarlane claims that at least two dozen studios have expressed an interest in the flick, but that he won’t let it happen unless it’s on his own strict terms.

“So I’m going, I’m not selling it but if you want to see the rough draft, I’ll send it to you. But just so everybody knows, I write, produce, direct, non-negotiable,” he explained, before confirming that he still intends to keep it small, and that studios have responded positively to that. “I wouldn’t ask to be a newbie director on a script that was going to have an eighty million budget for it. Why? Because as a CEO of my own corporation, I wouldn’t take that deal. I wouldn’t stick out $80 million and go, ‘they’re going to put a rookie and he’s going to basically be in charge of it.’ So I’ve created this tight little one that I keep saying, I think I can shoot it for ten.”

While his stubbornness is admirable on some level, it’s also not inspired further interest or development of the property. Although, to be fair, we can think of some streaming services that might be game enough to fancy a punt…

You can watch the whole interview below:

More as we have it.