Spawn Director Todd McFarlane Explains Why It Was Important To Get Jamie Foxx

To say that Todd McFarlane’s Spawn reboot has spent far too long languishing in development limbo would be to deal in wild understatement.

But after years of false starts, McFarlane and his team are ready to set the wheels in motion, no thanks to the casting of Jamie Foxx as Albert Francis “Al” Simmons, the luckless Black Ops operative who winds up making a deal with Malebolgia in order to escape the clutches of death and return home to his fiancée, Wanda Blake.

That is, in a nutshell, the elevator pitch for Blumhouse and Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, and now that they’ve located their leading man, development can begin in earnest. As a matter of fact, while chatting to ComicBook.com, the director and all-around comic book mainstay spoke at length about what Jamie Foxx brings to the project, explaining:

He’s got a lot of thoughts on what he wants to do and how to do it. He’s also very kind to go, ‘At the end of the day, Todd, it’s still your movie.’ It’s like I’m gonna be picking his brain as much as possible, and whoever else I get on the set. Not only just the actors, but also the editors and my cinematographer and everybody. Look, I’m gonna be arguably the most naïve, dumb guy on the set every day. So, as somebody who’s been a CEO for decades now, the way to sort of make things work is just surround yourself with good people and give them ownership and give them input into the project. I mean, somebody, at the end of the day, has to make the final call. That’s my position.

This being a Blumhouse production, there’s a good chance Spawn‘s low-key budget will allow Todd McFarlane and Co. to draft up early plans for a potential sequel. But let’s not get too carried away, as for the director, the first port of call is delivering a “dark and nasty reimagining” of the cult anti-hero.

McFarlane continued:

What I will be married to is what the scene or the emotion of the scene is supposed to convey. So, if I can keep that emotion, and you tell me that we have to shoot that outdoors or indoors, that’s sorta secondary to me. I’m going, ‘Cool, as long as I can get what I want. As long as I can get the emotion, I can get the beat, if you’re saying that we can shoot this faster by doing it as an exterior shot, and we can do it in five hours instead of doing it inside for ten hours, I don’t care.’

Filming on Todd McFarlane’s Spawn reboot is due to begin later this year, and when it does, it’ll seemingly be angled as a supernatural thriller, as opposed to your cookie-cutter origin story.