Following it learned at the recent New York Comic-Con that the Todd McFarlane Spawn movie had not yet been officially green lit, now it’s start of filming is pushed back as well.
Spawn was going to film at the start of next year, but now according to Production Weekly, the movie will not start production until at least June 2019.
The apparent reason for the delay is because Todd McFarlane revealed Hollywood is hesitant to green light an R-rated superhero movie.
“What’s next is getting Hollywood to get this. They’re still a little timid of doing a true, dark, nasty R-rated superhero… as soon as you say superhero, they sort of go into a little bit of a default. So we’re still trying to get them across the finish line,” Todd McFarlane revealed at a NYCC panel.
Spawn already has a script and director with Todd McFarlane, and a cast with Jamie Foxx as the titular character, in addition to The Avengers‘ Hawkeye-actor Jeremy Renner playing Detective Twitch Williams. To boot, Jason Blum and Blumhouse are on board as producers and Walking Dead‘s Greg Nicotero on for special effects, but we can guess that a studio is hesitant to get on board and complete the financing.
“The weak link in this whole thing is me. We’ve got Spawn, we’ve got Jamie [Foxx], Jeremy [Renner] and Jason [Blum]. I’m going to surround myself with an Academy Award-winning director of photography so it will look good,” McFarlane said at NYCC. “The acting will be good. Stop thinking of this as a traditional superhero movie! Because they go ‘How-come Spawn’s not in it more?’ And all the comments are based on superhero PG-13 thinking. We showed it to a couple of people at the studio last week and you could see they were a little bit… The mistake we made I think…. I told my agent ‘You didn’t let me go in the room!’ I need to go into the room. I need to sell it. I need to tell them what the frame is, of this picture, of the script that they are about to read, because they still keep going into the superhero default. And it doesn’t make sense.”
As Todd McFarlane notes, the problem seems to be that Hollywood is looking at Spawn as a traditional PG-13 superhero movie, but it is anything but.
“If you read my script with the superhero mode, it’s confusing. You go ‘I don’t understand it.’ Think about it as a scary movie that will get people to be mesmerized by Jeremy Renner’s acting and his character,” McFarlane said at the panel earlier in October. “And then ‘Oh yeah right, Spawn’s in this movie!’ And then he comes and when Spawn comes he’s not owned by corporate America. I don’t care about selling t-shirts and hats. So when Spawn comes, you better not wanna be the bad guy, because when Spawn comes, it’s nice and calm, and then you’re gone. He will mess you up and he will do it in a harsh way. He doesn’t care if he’s selling any toys or t-shirts.”
