MTV caught up with Todd McFarlane to talk about the plans to rebooth the 'Spawn' film after a disasterous first crack at it. Todd told MTV:
“With Spawn, I have five legitimate offers sitting on the table,” the writer/artist/entrepreneur revealed to MTV News recently. “Ever since ‘Iron Man,’ they’ve been phoning every day.”
At this point, McFarlane explained, he’s trying to decide between two options: “If I go with the lower-budget movie, they’ll let me direct it. And if I go bigger, than I sit in the producer’s chair; if the budget’s too big, they’re not going to give me the chance at [directing] it. So I’m trying to decide whether I want to go big production, bigger money, bigger marketing — or just do something that’s a little bit smaller, more rock ‘n’ roll, and the way I’ve had it in my brain for the last five years.”
“The thing I’ve had in my head for a long time isn’t a big comic-book movie,” he explained. “Everything’s real; it’s like ‘The Departed,’ ‘L.A. Confidential’ or something like that — and there’s only one thing out of the ordinary in the story I’ve written, which is the thing people know as Spawn. And only a few people see it.”
“To me, it’s more along the lines of ‘Jaws,’ where you didn’t see [the shark] for half the movie, and then you caught glimpses of him,” McFarlane said of Spawn, the only supernatural character in his vision. “Jaws was somewhat fantastic in that movie, and to keep it low-budget I can’t have spaceships and super-villains and all that stuff.”
“You’re not going to get an [origin story] with a rubber costume,” McFarlane explained of Spawn’s new look. “As a matter-of-fact, you’ll never see Spawn in his full regalia, because to me, he’s more of a sentinel, like a living shadow. I’ve shown the artwork [to potential investors] and he’s all black; he doesn’t look exactly like what people have seen in the comic book.”
