Speaking today at New York Comic Con, comic creator and soon-to-be-filmmaker Todd McFarlane opened up about the long in-development Spawn reboot that he’ll be directing. According to Deadline, McFarlane revealed that pre-production on the film will begin just after the Christmas holiday, with cameras set to start rolling in February. McFarlane reiterated that the film will be “dark and R-rated,” even going so far as to say that it would be a harder R than Deadpool.
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McFarlane also revealed that the budget for the film will be a meager $10 million, an atypical budget for a superhero film (which range into the hundreds of millions at Warner Bros. and Marvel Studios) but par for the course for Blumhouse Productions (who specialize in lower-budget features anywhere from $100k to $10 million). With such a smaller scale film, the money for which McFarlane himself is at least partially putting up, allows the filmmaker to share more content with fans from the set, which he promises to do every day of production.
“I’m spending my own money,” he said at NYCC. “So who cares if it doesn’t work out. It’s a $10 million budget movie, and (a studio) would just get a 22-year-old punk director. I just want to be the old punk directing it.”
First appearing in 1992’s Spawn #1, the character quickly became the symbol for 1990s comics dark and brutal antiheroes. His Hellspawn powers allow him to teleport, shape shift, and utilize a variety of weapons (notably chains) in combat.
Spawn previously made the leap to the big screen in 1997 with Michael Jai White in the title role and then on television as an HBO animated miniseries, titled Todd McFarlane’s Spawn.
