Ooooooh boy.

Those who have been following my coverage of Todd McFarlane‘s insanely long-gestating reboot of Spawn know that I’ve had some insight into the development process and have shared my skepticism that his comic adaptation will ever get off the ground.

As I wrote back in May, my sources had told me several times that McFarlane is unreasonable in many of his demands, refusing to allow anyone else to work on his screenplay and that many hurdles would need to be crossed before Spawn ever made it back to the big screen. I noted that Hollywood doesn’t work this way, although it’s hard not to respect the man’s determination to do things his way. In fact, it’s hard to imagine he’d ever get it his way, which means it’s even more unlikely that Spawn will be reborn.

It was exciting news when Blumhouse got involved. Not only do they have the brand, but they also have the first-look distribution deal with Universal. I figured, shit, with Blumhouse maybe, just maybe they’ll get him to allow another screenwriter to come in and fix up his screenplay. Then there were reports of a spring 2017 shoot, which were anything but confirmation that the film would actually go into production. When he landed commitments from Jamie Foxx and Jeremy Renner to star, that’s when I accepted that Blumhouse was actually going to help McFarlane get this done.

That was until the aforementioned article from this past May, in which McFarlane starting talking as if he was going to just blow everything up, exclaiming that he’ll just “walk away from it all” if he has “to change it too much.”

As a huge fan of McFarlane, Spawn, and the birth of Image Comics, I prayed that there’d be some good news out of the San Diego Comic-Con. Then it came and went without a whisper…until now. Apparently, McFarlane was throwing insult grenades all over his panel, and Comicbook.com has the transcript.

“Lemme see if I can just go real quick: Spawn movie, right? When are you going to make a Spawn movie, when are you going into production? My answer is ‘Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday,'” said McFarlane, who then said something that made my eyes pop out of my head:

“I need $20 million to make this movie, I don’t have all of it.

“I have to ask people for money, and once you ask people for money, they get to have a say in it. Like I said, it’s a little bit of an uphill battle, because again, I just want to do this little dark ‘R’ movie, and they like those PG-13 success movies.”

First of all, $20 million for a movie isn’t “little”, as he keeps calling it, and it’s actually more than nearly every single Blumhouse production, sans M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass. $20M is a lot for an R-rated horror movie where the main character doesn’t speak and is barely in it, as McFarlane has previously explained several times in comparing his Spawn screenplay to Jaws.

McFarlane has officially passed through the first two stages of grief – denial and anger – and has now entered the third stage, bargaining. He’s started to noodle the idea of crowd-funding Spawn without any understanding of the numbers or how it works.

“Look I am relentless, I’m like a dog with a bone. I will get there, I promise you. I will get there. Because I will beat the system.

“Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll do it as a Kickstarter… and here’s the Kickstarter: I need 20 million people to give me a dollar.

“And I will make this movie, and when I get the money back I’ll return the dollar back to you. And you will be my producers… and all I’ll need is the distribution. That’s doable today. I don’t get why Ryan Gosling doesn’t do that for every one of his movies, ‘I need 20 million of you to give me a dollar,’ are you kidding, he’d have it in an hour and could go do his thing! But people in the system are beholden to it and they have obligations, and the guy on the outside, me, goes ‘I’m only going to give them so much time, and then I’m just going to come up with some crazy idea.”

I could actually see McFarlane finding a way to get $5 million through crowdfunding and private investing, but $20 million is asinine. Shockingly asinine. His 1992 “Spawn” #1 is one of the highest-selling comic books in history and it peaked at 1.7 million copies. Even if every single one of those people gave him $10, he wouldn’t have enough to make Spawn. Furthermore, how is he going to give every single person their $1 back if it loses money, which it probably will when you include marketing costs and delivering all of the rewards to 20 million “investors”?!

No matter what I think, McFarlane feels confident that he’ll find a way to the finish line. In fact, I’m rooting for him. I love his work, what he did for comics and the toy industry, and I fucking love Spawn.

“…there’s people on the outside that want to give me money that aren’t in the system,” he added. “But we’re going to get it done. I’m just trying to play nice, now, but I’m starting to lose my patience. But we’ll try; it’s going to get there one way or another, I promise you. I’m not going to let this one go.”

Reiterating what I’ve written in several articles, he’s going to have to reach the fifth stage of grief, acceptance, before he’ll get this project off the ground. He’s likely going to have to either change the film’s targeted MPAA rating or the film’s budget, not to mention the rewrites that need to happen (if they haven’t over at Blumhouse). I don’t see how Spawn happens until something gives and, unfortunately, that something is McFarlane’s pride.