Spawn Reboot: Prepare for Two Hours of Joyless Ugliness

Thanks to the bottomless Blumhouse checkbook, Todd McFarlane is finally going to get to make the Spawn movie of his dreams, and his dreams – as you might suspect – are about as far away from the MCU as he can get.

Image Comics president McFarlane has been talking to Nerdist about the upcoming reboot, which has cast Jamie Foxx and Jeremy Renner as its leads. The movie is set to push the grim violence of Spawn as hard as it can this time around, taking the story of “back from the dead and pretty pissed off about it now” CIA agent-turned-nightmare demon Al Simmons to its natural state.

“There’s no joy,” McFarlane stated. “There’s gonna be no fun lines in it, and it’s just gonna be this dark, ugly two hours worth of movie, which is essentially what a lot of supernatural/horror movies are anyway. There’s not a lot of funny in them. And that seems to be a weird hurdle for a lot of people in this city to get over because they sort of go into a superhero/Avengers default all the time.”

You may remember that the 1997 Spawn film had a hell of a lot of laughs, almost all of them unintentional. With McFarlane having strict creative control over this new version, we’d imagine he’ll get the 18 rating he’s long desired, and squash the chuckles he doesn’t.

Spawn is currently still hovering in pre-production, but filming should get underway fairly soon.