Todd McFarlane unveils ambitious vision for Spawn movie reboot

As the years have gone on, Todd McFarlane has been on the front line helming the Spawn film reboot. The screenplay that he wrote has gone through significant rewrites, most recently by Matthew Mixon, Scott Silver, and Malcolm Spellman. Via Comicbook.com, it was revealed Silver, the two-time Academy award-nominated screenwriter behind The Fighter and Joker, discussed their hope for another studio to bankroll and release the Spawn reboot.  

McFarlane highlighted the fact that “[there’s] a script” but the [writers] are not “satisfied” with the film’s current draft quite yet. Although the last time the superstar artist commented on the script back during the actors and writer’s strike which delayed their progress for at least months, he mentioned [there will be] “some [more] rewrites.”

In anticipation of the upcoming release of Joker: Folie à Deux, McFarlane and Silver hope an official film studio will partner with them. Just to be clear, the Spawn reboot has Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions as producer alongside McFarlane himself. So, they have a production company but they require a distributor, preferably a major studio by the Big Five (Warner Bros., Paramount, Disney, etc.) or a mini-major like Sony, A24, or Lionsgate. About the script, McFarlane said:

"“We put it on paper and then we criticize ourselves. So they’re going through sort of an extensive sort of rework and rewrite of it. I was just on the phone a couple of days ago with Scott Silver, the guy who’s sort of manning the lead of it right now.”"

"“He’s also the writer of Joker and Joker 2. We’re all planning and hoping and moving towards having this done so that we can take it out so that we can find our studio finally pre-Joker 2 launch, which comes in October.”"

In the rapidly evolving digital age, even in our modern times, every movie, it always starts with the script. As the great Akira Kurosawa once said, “With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.”

So for Spawn to work this time around it may (or may not) take the creator of the source material (though it can help) to create a successful adaptation but a director must have an understanding but also have a distinctive style to capture the essence of the character.  

What would be interesting is which studio Silver and McFarlane are hoping to distribute the film reboot. Blumhouse, as part of their ten-year first-look deal with Universal which is expected to expire at some point this year, is their primary distributor. Other notable studios and streamers that worked with Blumhouse in the past were Paramount, Netflix, and Amazon, respectively. Spawn would be more at home with Universal.