This is Rumor Control. Here are the facts. A report from That Hashtag Show purports that Jamie Foxx has been offered the role of Al Simmons in the upcoming Spawn reboot, written and directed by the comic’s creator Todd McFarlane. Simmons is a former Force Recon Marine and CIA Black Ops operative who was betrayed and murdered by his own superiors and friends and subsequently descended to Hell. There, he made a deal with one of the rulers of Hell (Malebolgia) to become a “hellspawn” and leader of his infernal armies for the chance to see his wife again. Upon returning to Earth, he finds that he has very little memory of his former life, five years have passed, his wife is now married to his best friend and they have a child together. He then attempts to get his life back while battling street thugs, crime lords, psychotic killers, agents of Heaven and denizens of Hell. The film is being backed by Blumhouse Productions, the studio responsible for some of the biggest horror films and franchises of the past decade, including Paranormal Activity, Sinister, The Purge, Insidious, Ouija and Get Out.
This project has been a long time coming, for all parties involved. It was originally adapted into live-action in a 1997 film directed by vfx supervisor Mark A.Z. Dippé (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park) and starring Michael Jai White (S.W.A.T.: Under Seige, Blood and Bone) as Al Simmons/Spawn; making it the first film to feature an African American actor portraying a major comic book superhero. Based on a $40 million budget, it grossed a worldwide total of $87,840,042, making it a modest box-office success despite A PG-13 rating and a lackluster script. A sequel was put into development that McFarlane stated was to have centered primarily on the detectives Sam Bruke and Twitch Williams; leaving Spawn without a speaking part, relegated to a boogeyman character lurking beneath the surface of the story’s events like Jaws. This film never materialized, although there were various whispers here and there over the next decade.
In 2008, McFarlane stated that interest in a new Spawn film had stirred up again due to the success of Iron Man. At the time, he envisioned the new film as a smaller $10 million dollar movie that he himself would direct, calling it his “dealbreaker.” Over the next year, he began writing a script that would be a complete standalone reboot, describing the project as “a drama with a spook in it,” comparing it to The Departed and The Godfather meets Alien or Jaws. It was to feature a police detective character—an amalgam of Sam and Twitch—tracking a killer targeting mobsters in the city….who turns out to be Spawn. McFarlane apparently wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to star as the cop.
In 2011, as development on the script continued, Michael Jai White expressed support for McFarlane’s darker, more mature new film and interest in reprising the title role as well as possibly producing. In February 2013, McFarlane seemed to confirm he was considering a different actor for the part, claiming:
“I’ve got a guy waiting on the sidelines who’s an Academy Award-winning actor who phones every three weeks going ‘Todd, where’s the script? Where’s the script?’… He came out to the office, he gave me his pitch, I gave him my pitch, and he’s like ‘Fine, let’s do your gig.’”
Speculation had the actor being either Jamie Foxx or Cuba Gooding Jr., then a few months later in July 2013, Foxx revealed he was “aggressively pursuing” the role shortly before he was set to appear in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Development on the reboot started and stalled various times over the next few years, largely due to McFarlane maintaining he produce, write and direct. All the while, he maintained that Spawn would be a peripheral character this time around, and would have hardly or no lines in the entire film. In early 2016, he finally finished the 180-page script which he whittled down first to 132 then 120 pages over the next few months. Once finished, he began shopping it around to studios again, with Foxx’s involvement being a near constant unofficial component throughout the entire process.
At last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, McFarlane first announced that he was partnering with Blumhouse on the film, which was a perfect fit considering the studio’s penchant for producing films on a low budget while giving directors free reign creatively. The vision for their new project was described as “Paranormal Activity meets The Departed, wherein NYPD homicide detective Maximilian “Twitch” Williams is front and center, serving as the co-lead alongside Spawn. William’s partner Sam Burke will not appear, however. Instantly, comparisons were made to 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool and Logan; comparisons that McFarlane adamantly denied. One element of the story he’s ardulently maintained is that Spawn will not speak, elaborating by saying:
“So Spawn, the being of Spawn, the sentinel being of Spawn doesn’t speak, but I’ve created another way to be able to give him a voice. [The] presence of Spawn will have an outlet to get across his voice in a manner that will be fairly obvious to people who follow the Spawn comic book over the years.”
With Sony and Fox mining the superhero/horror genre with the upcoming Venom and The New Mutants, the time seems almost perfect for a dark, “hard R-rated” take on the character. Foxx has yet to officially accept the role, but I can’t imagine him not doing so in the coming days and weeks.
Spawn is reportedly looking to film sometime this summer/spring for release sometime in 2019.
Source: That Hashtag Show
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