Todd McFarlane Is Rejecting ‘Spawn’ Remake Scripts Over Creative Clashes, Wants “F***ing Dark” Version: “We Need Writers Who Will Work With Me” [Comic-Con]

Todd McFarlane and producer Jason Blum of Blumhouse have been painstakingly spending YEARS trying to bring to life a new live-action “Spawn” feature film (the 1997 release was a huge turkey despite a solid cast with martial artist Michael Jai White, Martin Sheen, and John Leguizamo in the main lineup) after enlisting Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx (“Miami Vice,” “Collateral”) for the role of Al Simmons, a former government assassin turned general in Hell’s army. The remake plans keep starting and stopping multiple times, even after positive updates. We have some new insight into WHY the recent delays are happening: creative clashes with the screenwriters.

In a new interview with Revenge Of at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, McFarlane directly states he’s been rejecting the new drafts himself and could be one of the real reasons the movie hasn’t moved into production (despite AI-generated set photos making the rounds online, confusing fans). “I keep rejecting the script,” he said bluntly. And when asked by the podcast host if they were “close” to getting it ready, McFarlane’s response was, “No.” Going into more detail about the creative process, “We need writers who will work with me. I am tired of giving my ideas away, sitting back waiting, and then they just hand it [over], and I read the script, and within 10 pages I go, ‘No, it’s off base.’ I need somebody that will work with me every day.”

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Also, in a completely separate interview with Popverse, McFarlane seems to be laying the groundwork for a pitch to have his own rejected lower-budget script resurrected (McFarlane has talked in the past about self-financing his version), citing the recent success of “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” two vision-focused original horror movies from new filmmakers that didn’t break the bank with budgets.

“I keep saying that it needs to be dark and gritty and ugly and scary at moments,” McFarlane told the outlet, “Creepy. It needs to be all that. Sometimes some of the writers sort of got away from it. But the writers are pros; you give them a leash, and you hope that they come back and deliver something that blows you away. They haven’t so far, but part of it is that I keep saying no to the scripts because I just go, ‘That’s not it.’ That’s not it, that one’s too far to the left, that one’s too far to the right. Unfortunately, it’s my taste that basically gets to call it Goldilocks, where it’s right in the middle.”

“Things like ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,'” he continued, “And even a new one recently, ‘Leviticus‘; there’s a vibe to those movies that, to me, is some of the stuff I’ve been saying for 10 years about ‘Spawn.’ We don’t have to have a ton of special effects. We don’t have to have a ton of blowing up.” McFarlane doesn’t think they should compete with deep-pocketed superhero heavyweights like Marvel Studios and Warner Bros., who can pour “$200 million” into a single film. “Why would we try and do that at a fraction of the price? Why don’t we lean into what ‘Spawn’ can be as a character that Captain America and Superman ‘can’t be?’ What they can’t be is dark. I mean, I’m talking serious dark, not Dark Knight, Batman dark. I’m talking f***ing dark.”

The version McFarlane had been hawking isn’t exactly a one-to-one with his comic book IP (having Spawn more of a supernatural entity than a gun-toting undead badass killing assassins, gangsters, serial killers, and crooked cops), and that’s likely why studios have been trying to bring in more seasoned screenwriters to help craft a studio project more viable to a wider audience and fans alike. We’re not entirely convinced that even “Spawn” fans are going to want a movie that barely mirrors the comics and that fantastic animated HBO series that ended up doing what the live-action movie couldn’t do: engaging storytelling.

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Considering that Blumhouse has merged with James Wan‘s Atomic Monster, it feels a tad misguided not to put an R-rated action-horror project like this in Wan’s lap to potentially direct and co-write. Wan has very much proven with franchises like “Saw” and “The Conjuring” that he can tap into what genre audiences want to see. Maybe “Spawn” should just head back to the grave?

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