Image Comics president and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane is back at it again. The long and difficult road to McFarlane’s planned Spawn movie reboot has not deterred him, and he still plans to have full creative control over it, no matter what he has to do to make that happen.
The developing film, which has Jamie Foxx and Jeremy Renner attached as leads and low budget studio Blumhouse onboard as producers, is said to be an ultraviolent adaptation of the comics about CIA agent-turned-nightmare demon Al Simmons. Spawn seems to be constantly in the process of hitting obstacles, which McFarlane admits are mostly down to his refusal to budge when it comes to outside involvement.
McFarlane has been speaking about the proposed movie’s progress at this year’s SDCC, and has revealed that his ballpark budget is currently way out of Blumhouse’s likely spend limit.
“Lemme see if I can just go real quick: Spawn movie, right? When are you going to make a Spawn movie, when are you going into production? My answer is ‘Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday’. I need $20 million to make this movie, I don’t have all of it. I have to ask people for money, and once you ask people for money, they get to have a say in it. Like I said, it’s a little bit of an uphill battle, because again, I just want to do this little dark ‘R’ movie, and they like those PG-13 success movies.”
McFarlane then promised gathered fans that he is “relentless” and “like a dog with a bone” promising that the Spawn reboot will happen when he beats “the system” and that right now he’s trying to “play nice” but that he’s starting to lose his patience. He then floated the idea of crowdfunding Spawn, which, given the logistics involved in releasing and promoting the subsequent product, seems like a virtually impossible task.
“Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll do it as a Kickstarter… and here’s the Kickstarter: I need 20 million people to give me a dollar. And I will make this movie, and when I get the money back I’ll return the dollar back to you. And you will be my producers… and all I’ll need is the distribution. That’s doable today. I don’t get why Ryan Gosling doesn’t do that for every one of his movies, ‘I need 20 million of you to give me a dollar,’ are you kidding, he’d have it in an hour and could go do his thing! But people in the system are beholden to it and they have obligations, and the guy on the outside, me, goes ‘I’m only going to give them so much time, and then I’m just going to come up with some crazy idea.'”
It’s worth noting that back in 2017, McFarlane said his Spawn movie only needed a $10 million budget.
