1997’s Spawn movie adaptation star Michael Jai White reveals if he would be open to reprising the role in Blumhouse‘s reboot of the Image Comics character.
“If I was invited to do it, then I’d apply myself toward it, but I mean, I think it’s been talked about for a very long time,” White said in an interview with ComicBookMovie.com while promoting his latest project, One More Shot.
He added, “And it seems that Todd McFarlane has been leading that conversation. I didn’t quite understand. I mean, I guess, there was talk about him directing it, but he had never directed before, so I thought that was kind of strange. It’d be a huge budget. All the power to him, but that would be an interesting decision to make.”
What Happened To New Line Cinema’s Spawn?
Spawn’s first live-action appearance came in the 1997 movie produced by New Line Cinema, which starred White as Al Simmons/Spawn.
Despite moderate success at the box office, the PG-13 rated Spawn was panned by critics. The movie’s star later expressed disappointment about the finished product. A sequel was planned as early as 1998, with the comic’s supporting detective characters Sam and Twitch as the leads. Ultimately, the sequel never got past the script stage.
Todd McFarlane announced plans to write and direct a Spawn reboot in 2007. Ten years later, the Spawn creator finalized a deal with Blumhouse to produce the reboot, with Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx attached to star in the title role. McFarlane teased a completely different superhero movie than anything that Marvel Studios has released.
“The one thing that I’m excited about in my conversations, and mostly with Scott Silver, is that he is just hell-bent – and don’t say that as a pun, literally – of wanting to do something different. Every conversation, he just is like, ‘We just can’t do Marvel lite.’ He doesn’t want to do horror because that is its own thing,” McFarlane explained. “He’s just fighting to try and see if we can do something slightly different. … I’ve always said when you try to do something different, you let the audience decide whether that’s better or worse, right? They’re the paying customer.”
Spawn does not have a set release date, although Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum has teased a 2025 release window.
