Jeremy Renner will star alongside Jamie Foxx in Todd McFarlane’s Spawn

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

It may have spent far too many years in development hell, but Todd McFarlane's SPAWN reboot is certainly making up for lost time. After setting up shop at Blumhouse Productions, McFarlane would go on to cast Jamie Foxx as the title character and now it appears as though Jeremy Renner will be joining him.

First reported by That Hashtag Show and confirmed by Deadline, Renner will be playing Maximilian "Twitch" Williams, a unconventional but brilliant detective who is near fearless. In a statement to Deadline, McFarlane said, "As a first time director, I wanted to surround myself with the most talent and the most skilled people I can on all fronts. I was lucky enough to land Jason Blum and then Jamie Foxx, and I knew the person on screen the most is this police officer, Twitch Williams. We needed as strong a person as possible because he will be the face of the film. I took my naïve Hollywood approach again, and said let’s start at the top and work down. Jeremy was at the top. I’m a huge fan of his. The character doesn’t need to be a bodybuilder or GQ handsome. I was looking for somebody who’s a person you’ve met before; I needed someone who can pull off the grief of an average human being. I’ve seen Jeremy do that in more than a few of his movies. He was at the top of my list, just like Jamie." McFarlane continued:

This is more a brawn and brain combination, and the first film I think of with him is The Hurt Locker, the army grunt doing the job, and that spilled out into all these roles leading up to Wind River. There was a sense of melancholy to that character that is important and that was a movie also made by a first time director, but one who wrote the thing and so wasn’t nervous about trying to get what you want. Jeremy had the experience of working with the first timer and saw that if you put a good crew together, the whole is way better than the parts and you don’t have to worry.

Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions added, "Jeremy is the ideal choice for Twitch Williams. He radiates honesty, intelligence and a hard-working, everyman charisma, the same qualities that make Twitch such a compelling character." There still work to be done before production begins, as Todd McFarlane says that the next step is to get a distributor to set the financing on the film. "Hopefully when we go to studios, fairly soon, we’ll get the interest of more than one and we can pick what place will do this project justice, marketing and distributing it," McFarlane said. "We’re going to go for as close to a green light as we can get, since the development process has already been done. We’re looking for someone to say, ‘yeah cool, we’ll take it.’ It’s a reasonable budget, we’re not asking anyone to stretch. The goal here is a quality project at reasonable price."

Sound off, folks! What do you think of Jeremy Renner as Detective Twitch?