Movies
‘Spawn’ Reboot Would Cost $20 Million; Todd McFarlane Could Crowdfund?!
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.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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