I’ve been glued to SPAWN since the HBO show premiered in 1997. Even now it’s one of the best animated comic series I’ve ever seen. HBO allowed the character to leap right off the page and didn’t turn away from the violence or graphic nature of the series. Then the movie came out a few months later….
I was letdown.
How could a movie even try to top that? It should have looked like SE7EN which was released two years prior. The movie wanted to be serious but serious turned into corn and I was just upset. I know I’ve ranted and rambled on about this before so let’s end it by saying that I want the next one to be better.
Creator Todd McFarlane offered up details on the budget and tone of the coming reboot. In an interview with AssignmentX.com, McFarlane told the site how he wanted to keep things low budget, “It’s a $10 million, R-rated supernatural movie that takes all the superhero stuff out of it. So for people who want to go see an Iron Man redo, that’s not it. For people who like The Conjuring, then it’s going to be right up that alley.”
THE CONJURING cost around $20 million to make but he’s going more for the feel and less on the effects. But it’s definitely not a horror flick, instead McFarlane said that it would be a, “Supernatural thriller. I grew up on things like Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, things like that. Those movies only had one fantastic element in [them], and it was the supernatural or the ghost, and everything else in the world was normal. With superheroes, you have to have the hero, the super-villain, the fantastic headquarters, sometimes even the sidekick and you get more and more fantastic. This is just going to be The Departed and L.A. Confidential with a ghost moving around in it.”
What about Jamie Foxx gunning for the lead role? When the McFarlane spoke with Foxx, he put more emphasis on the drama rather than the stunts, “You know, Jamie was out at my office. I thought we were going to keep it on the Q.T. I’ve talked to some pretty high-profile actors. I think he’s just putting the pressure on me to get the script done. So I sold him on my pitch. I go, ‘Here, I’ve got an idea that could keep you in the Spawn movies for twenty years, but it can’t be about physicality. It has to be more about a little bit of acting and then this specter, this sentinel, that moves around in an otherwise hard drama movie.’”
I agree that a film does not have to have a massive budget in order to be good. This, for me, is definitely something that you have to get right on all fronts: writing, directing, and casting. If one of those elements is weak then it’s going to pull everything else down. But will they get it right this time?