We learned yesterday that Jamie Foxx has officially landed the role of Al Simmons/Spawn in Blumhouse’s upcoming Todd McFarlane-directed Spawn, which is aiming for a hard “R” rating and may potentially, if all works out as planned and the film does well at the box office, kick off a trilogy of new film adaptations of McFarlane’s Spawn comic books.
What do we know about this iteration of Spawn so far? For starters, it won’t be an origin story, and we won’t actually be seeing (or hearing) all that much of the title character in it. Rather than giving us super cool “hero shots,” McFarlane aims to present Spawn like a silent, stalking horror movie villain, comparing him in recent interviews to the shark from Jaws.
As for the character Twitch Williams, he’ll essentially be playing the film’s Chief Brody.
Deadline laid out the new film’s plot details this week:
“Simmons is a member of a CIA black ops team who is betrayed twice. After being set up by his cohorts to be murdered with his corpse set aflame, Simmons is double-crossed in Hell. He is convinced to become a Hellspawn warrior in exchange for being able to be reunited with his wife.
But Spawn finds himself stuck in a demonic creature shell, and that his wife moved on and married his best friend. So this is one pissed off antihero who attends to dispatching the scum of the city in good and evil battles that encompass earth, heaven and hell.”
In a chat with Syfy today, McFarlane spoke a bit more about the project, doubling down on the promises of rated “R,” horror movie terror and comic book faithfulness.
“There will almost be nothing that’s in the movie that I won’t be able to show you a page from somewhere in the 280+ issues of Spawn we’ve published,” McFarlane told the site. “I’m not really making anything up out of the blue. I’m really piecing together elements and moments from various Spawn stories. Anything that’s in the movies, I’ll be able to pinpoint a page in a particular issue where that scene came from. I’ll hit it with a bigger visual drumbeat in the movie because I need to speak to a larger audience that may not know who Spawn is and will be looking at it through a different lens. They want to be entertained and creeped out, and I have to deliver that.”
McFarlane continued, touching on the mood-heavy horror movie approach, “I don’t actually intend to show [Spawn] from head to toe in the movie. You’re never going to get a hero shot in the movie. Twitch is the character I keep calling my Sheriff Brody. That movie is about the shark and how the shark moves and what he does. That’s my Spawn. Twitch is like Brody, who’s part of the human contingent who’s trying to find out if this thing really does exist.”
“What I want to convey in the marketing is that there’s this thing out there and you better hope you’re not a bad guy. Because when this thing comes, unlike Superman, Batman or Spider-Man, it’s not going to be gentle. It’s going to bite, and it’s going to bite hard.”
