It’s official, Jamie Foxx is suiting up as Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. Foxx has been top of the list to play the character for years, but with the film recently finding a home at Blumhouse the rumors began running wild that it would finally happen, and now McFarlane has his guy.
McFarlane has been promising an R-rated Spawn movie for so long I don’t think anybody thought it would be a reality, but this really move really hits the accelerator. Foxx will take on the role of Al Simmons, a soldier who is betrayed, killed, and reborn as a Hellspawn. Rather than serving the forces of Hell he instead becomes an antihero, while also pining for the woman that he loves. The character was immensely popular during the scorching hot creator-focused ’90s, even rivaling the X-Men. That popularity is long gone but the character still has a cult following who could turn out to see him on the big screen again. The PG-13 movie released in 1997 was a joke, and the gold standard for adaptations remains HBO’s animated TV series. You should go find it and watch it sometime to get a feel for Spawn the dark edges that are so much a part of his world.
References to Jaws and A Quiet Place have given us a view into McFarlane’s approach to the movie, which will have a reported $10M budget. Basically, keep actual appearances by Spawn few and far between. McFarlane told Deadline…
“The scariest movies, from Jaws to John Carpenter’s The Thing, or The Grudge and The Ring, the boogeyman doesn’t talk. It confuses people because of the comic book industry, and because they all default into their Captain America mindset and I keep saying, no, get into John Carpenter’s mindset or Hitchcock. This is not a man in a rubber suit, it’s not a hero that’s going to come and save the damsel. It’s none of that. At the end of the movie, I’m hoping that the audience will say either, is this a ghost that turns into a man, or is it a man that turns into a ghost? I’ve got a trilogy in mind here, and I’m not inclined in this first movie to do an origin story. I’m mentally exhausted from origin stories. Luckily, there’s a movie that just came out that helps my cause. In A Quiet Place, the first thing on screen is a card in black and white letters that says Day 89. It doesn’t care about what happened in those first 88 days. There are a couple headlines, but then we are on day 450. That movie doesn’t worry about explaining and giving all the answers. What it said in that case was, if you can hang on for a story of survival of this family, this movie will make complete sense for you.”
So far there’s no Spawn release date but I have to expect that to change soon.
