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Todd McFarlane Says an Oscar Winner Wants to Take on 'Spawn' Movie

by Ethan Anderton
February 19, 2013
Source: MTV

Back in 1997, Michael Jai White brought the dark fantasy comic book character Spawn to life. The film wasn't a runaway success making just over $84 million worldwide on a $40 million budget, so comic creator Todd McFarlane has been trying to get a new film franchise off the ground. For years McFarlane has been talking about bringing Spawn back to the big screen, and in an interview with MTV (via Cinema Blend) at the TIA Toy Fair, he again mentioned his continued efforts, touting that an Oscar winning actor keeps calling him every few weeks. Apparently the plan involves doing multiple movies, likely with a lot of CGI.

For those who are unaware, Spawn is the hellish resurrected alter ego of a man named Al Simmons, a highly trained assassin who was considered the best. But his superiors decided that he knew too much as he started to question their actions and decided to have him killed. After his death, Simmons made a deal to sell his soul to a Demonic Being known as Malebolgia to get to see his wife again. He was allowed to return to the real world, but was deceivingly sent back five years later as some kind of strange Hellspawn with no memory of what he had done. But slowly, he figures out his past, and seeks revenge.

Honestly, here's no greater self-hype machine than Todd McFarlane, but he says that this unnamed actor is, "Every three weeks he’s on the phone going, ‘Todd, where’s the script? Todd, where’s the script?’” And he adds, "The pitch I gave was that we could do ten of these for the next ten years and he wouldn’t have to be 22 for the rest of his life.” That sounds like quite the heavy amount of special effects, but if we never see Spawn outside of his suit, then it's not hard to imagine how that would be possible without doing anti-aging effects or a fully computer generated younger actor like Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy.

So who could this unnamed actor be? Well, considering the lead character in the comic book is black, if we take that into consideration with the Oscar winning element, our options become easy to sift through. The most obvious choice is Jamie Foxx. In fact, the actor visited McFarlane's offices, and made it clear that he's a big fan of Spawn. However, someone like Foxx has to be sifting through tons of offers all the time, and I can't imagine him bugging someone like McFarlane for this kind of film, especially now that he's playing Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But again, it's not out of the question, and even seems likely.

But other African American Academy Award winning actors like Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. seem like they might need a career boost, and a comic book property like this could help. For now though, the project is just a pipe dream, and McFarlane has been talking about this Oscar winning actor expressing interest for a couple of years, mentioning the same fact on Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast. Take all this with a grain of salt and don't expect any immediate development, but the prospect of Spawn getting another film adaptation is at least intriguing. What do you think?

Filed under Development, Movie News

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