Movies
KNB’s Greg Nicotero Had Actually Started Work on ‘Spawn’ for Todd McFarlane
I’ve never heard anyone talk the talk as much as comic legend Todd McFarlane, who has been touting his reincarnation of Spawn for several years now. In fact, if Blumhouse hadn’t have attached themselves as producers, I’d be even more skeptical than I already am.
While the Blumhouse announcement came out of left field and surprised all of us, it added much-needed legitimacy to the long-gestured project. The momentum appeared to snowball with the attachment of Jamie Foxx as the title character and then the addition KNB’s Greg Nicotero was the icing on the cake.
That was three years ago.
In a brand new interview with the effects titan, Nicotero reveals that he actually started work on Spawn and continues to poke McFarlane about the film’s progress.
“We have designs … [McFarlane] came in, and he said, ‘Look, we’re doing this thing, and it’s going to be low budget, and it’s kind of down and dirty. And I want it to feel more like the animated show [Todd McFarlane’s Spawn], where it’s like Spawn meets David Fincher,'” Nicotero told Comicbook ahead of the San Diego Comic-Con. “He wanted to do this kind of gritty down and dirty thing. And so, we did a lot of concept work here. We did a bunch of design busts and a lot of really, really cool stuff. And then it kind of stalled.”
It sure does sound like he fell for the hype, too.
“Every once in a while, I’ll reach out and go, ‘Hey,'” Nicotero added. “I’ll look at the busts in my office and be like, ‘Hey, Todd, what’s going on with this? Are we ever going to make this?’ Because I’m really in love with the design work we did.”
The most recent update came eight months ago when Blumhouse head honcho Jason Blum told Inverse that they are still working on getting the story right.
“It’s taken longer than I hoped it would have to get the story right, but we’re still working on it,” Blum told the site at the time.
“It’s gonna be very different, it’s gonna be very edgy,” he added. “What excited me about it is that Spawn is kind of the last great unexploited comic. So that seemed like an amazing opportunity.”
As noted in the initial release, “Spawn” was the first massive launchpad for Image Comics in May of 1992. New Line Cinema would adapt the comic in 1997 with Michael Jai White starring as an elite mercenary who is killed but comes back from Hell as a reluctant soldier of the Devil. He starred alongside John Leguizamo. A “Spawn” animated series also ran from 1997-1999, totaling 18 episodes.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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