UPDATE: After 4 years in development, some progress has finally been made with Spawn. Creator Todd McFarlane announced that writers Scott Silver (Joker) and Malcolm Spellman (The Falcon and The Winter Soldier) has been tapped to work on the script.
“I originally wrote a script, and the debate internally is, ‘I don’t know. This white Canadian, Todd, should he be the guy of writing the story for this character? Or should we be more respectful of what it is we’re trying to accomplish here?. So we kept constantly talking about, what’s the team? What’s the whole team that will help take us there? So I’m hoping that the whole becomes better than the sum of its parts, and that people will get excited that everybody’s bringing their own pedigree to the table, whether it’s Jason [Blum] or Jamie [Foxx] or whoever on top of it. I hope that the people will at least be curious, excited, and hopefully the day we get to show off our first trailer, people will find that entertaining enough to want to go on opening weekend. So there’s the goal. One of the ways to get there is either the accomplishments of people or the names of people. That’s always been my goal, is to put together those A-list people. We’ve got a nice band of A-list people for a project that began as sort this low budget sort of thing. And it’s like, ‘Don’t take Todd’s word for it now,'” said McFarlane.
SOURCE: ComicBook
Previously played by martial arts star Michael Jai White (Undisputed 2) back in 1997, Jamie Foxx (Django Unchained) is set to step into the role of Al Simmons in the upcoming reboot of Spawn.
Creator Todd McFarlane will make his directorial debut from a script written by himself as he made the announcement via Instagram:
For those unfamiliar with the comics, Spawn follows “Al Simmons, a member of a CIA black ops team who is betrayed twice. After being set up by his cohorts to be murdered with his corpse set aflame, Newman is double crossed in Hell. He is convinced to become a Hellspawn warrior in exchange for being able to be reunited with his wife. But Spawn finds himself stuck in a demonic creature shell, and that his wife moved on and married his best friend. So this is one pissed-off antihero who attends to dispatching the scum of the city in good and evil battles that encompass Earth, Heaven and Hell”.
The reboot will lean towards more with the horror elements as McFarlane stated to Deadline: “If you want to see something creepy and powerful where you go, just what the hell was that? I’m not going to explain how Spawn does what he does; he is just going to do it. We’ll eventually do some of the background if we make a trilogy, but that’s not this first movie. The first movie is just saying, do you believe? And if you believe than that’s good because I’m hoping to take you for a long ride with this franchise.”
Produced by Blumhouse Productions, the film is said to have a very low budget in the $10-$12 million range, so do not expect a visual effects spectacle as oppose to more of a character driven horror thriller.
Stay tuned.