In 1997, five years after the Image Comics character Spawn debuted to the masses, Michael Jai White brought the demonic antihero to life in a live-action movie that even White admitted wasn’t any good. Now it’s coming up on nearly a decade since Spawn creator Todd McFarlane started trying to get a reboot off the ground with Blumhouse Productions, which will deliver its trademark “edge.” While there’s still no timeframe on when this project will be slated on the schedule of upcoming superhero movies, McFarlane has provided an update in its status and revealed a connection to the Joker franchise.
It was announced in 2022 that Joker co-writer Scott Silver was teaming up with Malcolm Spellman and Matt Mixon to pen a new Spawn script. While speaking with Comicbook, McFarlane shared that Silver is still on board the project, and they’re hoping to finally find Spawn a studio home ahead of Joker 2’s release on the 2024 movies schedule. In the comic book creator’s words:
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.
As with the first movie, Scott Silver wrote Joker 2, a.k.a. Joker: Folie à Deux, with director Todd Phillips, and the long-awaited movie pairing Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck with Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn will come out on October 4. Ahead of that though, McFarlane is hoping that after so many years spent in development hell, Spawn can finally be set up somewhere and begin production. However, that will only happen if Silver, Todd McFarlane and the other writers can ensure that the script is the best it can be.
On that note, McFarlane also said in this interview that he’s had “intense storytelling conversations” with Silver, and the latter is specifically hoping Spawn’s ending will “have some meaning and some purpose, not just that the good guy won.” McFarlane continued:
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.
Considering how long we’ve been waiting for the Spawn reboot, it’s difficult to say whether McFarlane and his team will be successful in partnering with a studio or if they’ll need to come up with a new game plan for 2025. In 2018, Jamie Foxx was cast to play Spawn, originally known as Al Simmons, and there hasn’t been any mention of him exiting the role. Jeremy Renner was also cast as Detective Twitch Williams that same year, but it’s unclear if he’s still attached to the project.
Rest assured that whenever the next major, concrete Spawn update comes in, we’ll pass it along. For now, the original Spawn movie can be streamed on Tubi, and the animated series that ran for three seasons on HBO can be accessed with a Max subscription.