Todd McFarlane In Talks To Make A New Spawn Movie

It's been a week of reboot news, and tonight is no different. Comic book artist/writer turned entrepreneur Todd McFarlane tells IESB that he's got "five offers on the table" for a new Spawn movie, ranging from big studio to smaller scale. Todd says that he's leaning towards the latter, which would "keep it down, keep it dark, keep it grungy", comparing his idea to "The Departed with something moving in the shadows."

"It's not a comic book movie, it's just a scary movie, a creepy movie. Everything's real except for one element, which happens to be the character we know as Spawn. So it's not going to be super villain vs superhero or any of that stuff, it's just going to be a 'tight' movie."

Back in the early 1990's, I was a huge fan of Spawn. McFarlane, a popular Spider-Man artist defected from Marvel and formed Image Comics with six other popular comic book artists. McFarlane's art was always the big selling point for me. The first issue went on to sell over 1.7 million copies, a record for an independent comic book. McFarlane has since expanded to other areas, and is probably best known outside of the comic book world for line of action detailed figures.

Anyway, a film based on the comic was released in 1997. Despite the special effects, which were impressive at the time, the movie was not well received by fans or critics. I know that we're now in a post-Dark Knight world where dark is back in style, but I felt one of the reasons the original film didn't work was that it was too gritty, and lacked much of the style and gloss of the comics. Don't get me wrong, Spawn will never be Spider-Man, but I think its better to aim for stylistic more than gritty. More Sin City than The Dark Knight, Spider-Man or X-Men. What do you think?

photo credit: Flickr