Todd McFarlane reveals the new Spawn movie will go out to studios this Fall.
Todd McFarlane’s journey to get a new feature film of Spawn off the ground has been a battle in the trenches for years, but when speaking with ComicBook he told us he feels “more confident now” than at any other point in the process. What began as a project that McFarlane was going to write and direct himself for a smaller budget, the new Spawn movie has brought in two-time Academy award nominated screenwriter Scott Silver (The Fighter, Joker) to help it get in front of cameras. McFarlane took us slightly behind-the-scenes of what his conversations with Silver are like for the new Spawn movie, and revealed how they hope to have an official studio partner ahead of the release of Joker: Folie Ă Deux.
“There’s a script but the writers are, they’re not quite sort of satisfied with their own work, which is what all of us creative people are,” McFarlane revealed. “We put it on paper and then we criticize ourselves. So they’re going through sort of an extensive sort of rework and rewrite of it. I was just on the phone a couple of days ago with Scott Silver, the guy who’s sort of manning the lead of it right now. He’s also the writer of Joker and Joker 2. We’re all planning and hoping and moving towards having this done so that we can take it out so that we can find our studio finally pre-Joker 2 launch, which comes in October.”
In order for the movie to get to that place though the script itself will need to be in a place where Todd and the other writers have signed off on it, insuring its the version they want to take out into the world. McFarlane went on to open up about some of the intense storytelling conversations that he has had with Scott Silver, noting that the writer has high hopes for how the Spawn movie’s ending will “have some meaning and some purpose, not just that the good guy won.”
“I wish everybody could hear the conversation because he is so impassioned about what he’s talking about. He is so engrossed in what he’s doing…It’s not like he’s just like, I’m just trying to get it done. It’s just not a good guy versus bad guy story… He said the other day, ‘I’d rather take a swing and it be too big of a swing then to not take a hard enough swing at it….He’s kind of fearless and he doesn’t want to replicate what he knows is sort of the safe, probably predictable path that most people would go because it’s the proven path, right? Just wants to bend it. He wants it because we’re gonna do R rated and we’re gonna do it and it can’t be mini-Marvel and mini-DC. It can’t.”
McFarlane went on to predict that there’s potential for Deadpool & Wolverine and Joker: Folie Ă Deux to become the two highest grossing movies of the year. Should that come to pass, he expects Hollywood to do what it always does, replicate the success and start a trend.
“Between Deadpool and Joker Two. What’s the commonality? Comic books, R rated….If they do their work and they look at it and they pay attention and they vet it. They’re gonna see that there’s like Spawn and then it’s a precipitous drop. If you want comic book, sort of superhero, R rated stuff. He’s built for it. He’s been built for it and he’s staring you in the face at the time you’re looking for it. He’s available.”
To cap it all off, McFarlane noted, “I feel more confident now at any point in the process, given all the dynamics that are there right now. So I’m excited, man. I can’t wait for it.”
