The Walking Dead’s Greg Nicotero boards Todd McFarlane’s Spawn movie

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Todd McFarlane's reboot of SPAWN has finally emerged from the depths of development hell and McFarlane has been gathering some top talent to assist him on bringing the project to life. The latest individual to board SPAWN will be filling an important role behind-the-scenes – creating the design for Spawn himself. It was announced today that Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead) and his company KNB EFX will be joining SPAWN. "I’m a long-time fan of Greg’s work and the projects his company, KNB, has done throughout the years," said Todd McFarlane in a statement. "Working with him once again, to re-invent the Spawn ‘look’ so it will match the supernatural theme in the movie, is going to be a fun process."

Greg Nicotero has been involved in an incredible number of genre projects over the decades, including DAY OF THE DEAD, ARMY OF DARKNESS, SCREAM, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and many, many more, including the first SPAWN film. While speaking with ComicBook.com, McFarlane said that he knew the reboot would be focusing heavily on practical effects rather than CG, so he would need someone capable of pulling it off.

When I conceived of the story to start with, I never really thought of it as big special effects extravaganza because I knew we weren't going to have the budget for it. So I knew I was going to rely heavily on practical makeup and costuming, and one of the places that kept popping up was my good pal Greg Nicotero on his KNB Group. And he's obviously done a tremendous amount of work on dozens and dozens of movies. The sort of serendipitous part of it is that Greg was there at the beginning 20 years ago for the original Spawn movie.

Todd McFarlane was also quick to say that the look of Spawn will be much different this time around. "​I think it would be a mistake for people to go, 'Oh, it's going to look like the first movie.' No. That's not the task nor is that sort of where we're at creatively," McFarlane said. Over the course of several weeks, Greg Nicotero and his KNB team were able to come up with all sorts of concept art for the new take on the character. "He's this sort of part feral animal, driven completely by this rage that he has, and he really embraced the idea of getting the sense of how much we want to see of this character, and what we want the audience to see," Nicotero said. "It's always the situation where you give the audience at times glimpses of things to allow them to put things together in their minds, and I think there's a very specific way that Todd wants to build these impressions of what Spawn is, and what he looks like by starting out with some kind of simple, very evocative imagery, and flashes. One minute he's there, and the next minute he's not. Kind of cool stuff."

The upcoming reboot will star Jamie Foxx (DJANGO UNCHAINED) as Spawn and Jeremy Renner (WIND RIVER) as Maximilian "Twitch" Williams, a unconventional but brilliant detective who is near fearless. It's expected that SPAWN will be an R-rated affair and Todd McFarlane has said that they're going to push the boundaries beyond what comic-book films such as DEADPOOL and LOGAN have done, saying, "We're talking trauma, true trauma, as serious as possible."