According to ComicBook.com, Todd McFarlane has confirmed that Oscar winner Jamie Foxx is still attached to the Spawn reboot. McFarlane cleared the air after he recently revealed during an interview with Shoryuken that an “Academy Award-winning guy” had left the project sparking rumors that person was Foxx, but McFarlane clarified he was actually referring to a writer who had to leave due to conflicting schedules.
There’s been some WRONG speculation about the movie, but I’m setting the record straight!
Jamie Foxx Still Attached to Spawn Movie, Despite Reports https://t.co/qTf8h6MC2T via @ComicBook
— Todd McFarlane (@Todd_McFarlane) March 10, 2020
During the interview with Shoryuken, McFarlane revealed that he feels confident “Hollywood is a different place right now; they understand the value of what Spawn can bring to a reasonable budget.”
McFarlane added that he does have a few demands for the movie, however: “I have very few demands for the movie. It has to be rated R, there’s no debate around that. With the story I want to tell, my intent goes back to that Spawn Cloud. I am less concerned about what happens in the movie as long as Spawn is “cool” and “badass”. The last demand is that I am the director. That’s it. Everything else is up for conversation. I just want to show that there are better and smarter ways to entertain an audience than what they are used to. So much more is possible once you open yourself to rated R stories. But I can’t just do a cardboard version, I need the budget to do it. Just enough to make it the right way.”
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When McFarlane offered an update on the project last year, he had shared that everyone had yet to agree on the same script. McFarlane is set to write and direct the Spawn reboot, which he previously confirmed will be “dark and R-rated,” even going so far as to say that it would be a harder R than Deadpool. McFarlane also revealed that the budget for the film will be a meager $10-to-$12 million, an atypical budget for a superhero film (which range into the hundreds of millions at Warner Bros. and Marvel Studios) but par for the course for Blumhouse Productions (who specialize in lower-budget features anywhere from $100k to $10 million). With such a smaller scale film, the money for which McFarlane himself is at least partially putting up, allows the filmmaker to share more content with fans from the set, which he promises to do every day of production.
First appearing in 1992’s Spawn #1, the character quickly became the symbol for 1990s’ comics dark and brutal antiheroes. His Hellspawn powers allow him to teleport, shapeshift, and utilize a variety of weapons (notably chains) in combat. Spawn previously made the leap to the big screen in 1997 with Michael Jai White in the title role and then on television as an HBO animated miniseries, titled Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. The character recently celebrated his 25th anniversary and will hit over 300 issues sometime next year, taking the record from “Cerebus the Aardvark” of the longest-running independent comic book ever published.
