Spawn creator and toy designer Todd McFarlane has been talking up the potential of a new Spawn movie/TV franchise for years – first as a sequel in 1998 and then as a Batman Begins-style reboot in 2007.
The project doesn’t seem to have moved forward in any real sense, but speaking to MTV, McFarlane confirmed he’s still working on it.
“I continue to write a page here and there,” said McFarlane. “As I’ve said before, I’ve got a guy waiting on the sidelines who’s an Academy Award-winning actor who phones every three weeks going ‘Todd, where’s the script? Where’s the script?’
“He came out to the office, he gave me his pitch, I gave him my pitch, and he’s like ‘Fine, let’s do your gig.’ The pitch I gave him was that we could then do, like, ten of these for the next ten years, and he wouldn’t have to be 22 for the rest of his life.”
1997’s Spawn, which played fast and loose with the canon of the comic-book antihero, was a mediocre box office success, that was panned by both critics and comic fans – the latter objecting to the PG-13 tone. It did however find support in a more fondly recalled animated series which ran from 1997 to 1999.
“The plan would be to do the movie, bring the movie out and then go back on TV with the animation like we did the first time,” explained McFarlane.
“But the cool thing with the animation is we’ve got 90 minutes all set, ready to go, other than just sending it to an animation house. We’ve done all the voice recordings, we’ve done all the backgrounds and everything. So the technology is way better than it was a decade ago. and there’s some spectacular stuff that we can now do when we bring it back that we were never able to do on HBO.”
Pick up the Spawn: Director’s Cut on Blu-ray for £12.99 or DVD for £12.96 from Amazon.co.uk.
