After years and years in development, the wheels are finally in motion on Todd McFarlane’s Spawn movie and he’s found his leading man.
Deadline reports that Jamie Foxx has signed up to play the title character in the Blumhouse-produced film. Spawn, of course, is the twisted dark superhero who began as CIA black ops agent Al Simmons who was betrayed and murdered by his employers. Because of all the shady business he got up to on behalf of the American government, Al is sent to Hell where he strikes a deal with the devil to return to Earth and his beloved Wanda. In exchange for being sent back to the land of the living, he’ll become a Hellspawn badass with all the superpowers and chains that entails.
The comics were previously turned into a film in 1997, with Michael Jai White in the title role, Martin Sheen as Al’s nefarious boss, and John Leguizamo labouring under a colossal amount of prosthetics as The Violator. It was very much an action movie, and McFarlane has promised a much darker, much scarier take on the story this time out with a budget of approximately $12 million and an R-rating in mind.
He’s also got a trilogy planned, telling Deadline that “If you want to see something creepy and powerful where you go, just what the hell was that? I’m not going to explain how Spawn does what he does; he is just going to do it. We’ll eventually do some of the background if we make a trilogy, but that’s not this first movie. The first movie is just saying, do you believe? And if you believe than that’s good because I’m hoping to take you for a long ride with this franchise.”
However, he did stress that this first film will not be an origin story, and will instead throw audiences into a world in which Al is already Spawn, rather than one in which Al becomes Spawn.
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