Earlier this year, Todd McFarlane announced that he’d completed a massive screenplay for a new Spawn film. Since then, nothing has been heard about the status of the project, which makes sense as McFarlane admitted that he needed to edit his script down around 45 pages to bring it to a still long 140 pages. In filmmaking, the general consensus is that each page in a script should take about one minute of the film, so this suggests a film that is well over two hours, something studios would almost certainly balk at.
In a new interview with AMC’s “Geeking Out”, McFarlane was interviewed about the status of the project, to which he replied that it is going to happen and that he wants something, “…dark, R-rated, scary, badass.” He explains that the world is going to be real with an element of fantasy. He used The Exorcist as an example of this, where everything in the film was real except for this young girl and what was happening with and around her. He also likened it to another horror classic by explaining, “…you’re never going to see a dude in a rubber suit….This is going to be my ‘Jaws’ shark.”
McFarlane talked about this concept back in February with ComicBook.com, saying, “In the background, there’s this thing moving around, this boogeyman. That boogeyman just happens to be something that you and I, intellectually, know is Spawn. Will he look like he did in the first movie? No. Will he have a supervillain he fights? No. He’s going to be the spectre, the ghost.”
Spawn began as a comic book, was converted into an HBO animated series, and then was brought to the silver screen in 1997 with Michael Jai White in the titular role. It wasn’t exactly well received but the soundtrack kicked a lot of ass and John Leguizamo nailed the role of Clown.
