New 'Spawn' Movie Gets A New Writer, But Will It Ever Actually Get Made?

In April 2009 (you read that right), we reported that Todd McFarlane was in talks to make a new Spawn movie. Since then, children have been born and they've grown to the age of 12 without ever knowing what Spawn is. Yet there are those of us who grew up in the 1990s who do remember Spawn, not only the Image Comic but also the New Line Cinema film starring Michael Jai White in hamburger-face makeup.

Over the years, we've heard various updates about McFarlane's Spawn reboot. The latest one involves Broken City scribe Brian Tucker, who has now boarded the project as screenwriter.

THR reports that Tucker has been hired to write the script for Spawn. McFarlane wrote the previous draft and he has long been attached to direct for Blumhouse Productions. At one point, Jamie Foxx was set to star as Al Simmons, the murdered black-ops agent who makes a deal with the devil Malebolgia to come back to life so he can be with his wife. However, like Simmons upon his resurrection as a hellspawn, we're now looking at a situation where time has passed.

THR notes that Foxx and Jeremy Renner, who was set to co-star as the detective Twitch, "could be re-approached after a script is written." For now, their continued involvement, if any, remains unclear.

It was a big moment in comics history when McFarlane, the superstar Spider-Man artist, left Marvel to form Image Comics with several of his peers. Spawn #1 hit newsstands in 1992, and along with the ensuing toy company McFarlane launched, it made him rich enough that he could afford to shell out $3 million for Mark McGwire's 70th home run baseball. Time magazine called him "The Man with the Million Dollar Balls."

You would need some serious cojones to think you could helm a Spawn movie, especially having never directed a feature film before. That's McFarlane for you: keeping the dream alive. To be fair, he did co-direct some old music videos like Pearl Jam's "Do the Evolution" and Korn's "Freak on a Leash," so it's understandable that his head might be filled with delusions of David Fincher-like grandeur, vis-a-vis his long-gestating Spawn reboot. At least, that's how it sounded last month when we heard some other Spawn rumblings from special effects make-up wizard Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead, Creepshow). Nicotero said:

"We have designs...[McFarlane] came in, and he said, 'Look, we're doing this thing, and it's going to be low budget, and it's kind of down and dirty. And I want it to feel more like the animated show, where it's like Spawn meets David Fincher. He wanted to do this kind of gritty down and dirty thing. And so, we did a lot of concept work here. We did a bunch of design busts and a lot of really, really cool stuff. And then it kind of stalled."

Someday, when we're all sitting around the retirement home, we might be able to see McFarlane's self-directed Spawn reboot on the schedule for movie night. I like to think I've got my finger on the pulse of America's youth, and I'm sure said Spawn movie will be a culturally relevant masterpiece of Fincherian proportions.