In a suspicious coincidence, a superhero reboot stuck firmly in development hell for 25 years was ‘almost finished’ before the strikes hit

If there’s one thing you can bank on just as solidly as the Spawn reboot remaining stuck firmly in the deepest bowels of development hell, it’s Todd McFarlane repeatedly telling anyone who’ll listen that it won’t be there for much longer. Funnily enough, it tends to stay right where it is every time.

A do-over of the infamously terrible original – although one person’s trash is another’s cult classic – has tentatively been in the works since 1998. Since then, innumerable writers, directors, and stars have come and gone, with the one constant being creator McFarlane refusing to acknowledge that it hasn’t actually gained any forward momentum in a quarter of a century.

And yet, here we are once again stuck in the perpetual loop, with the comic book legend revealing to ComicBook that in what’s quite the coincidence, the most recent draft of the screenplay was almost done and ready to be handed in before the strikes hit.

“We were in the middle of writing the script and then the writers strike came. So that basically came to a screeching halt, if you will. But they were pretty far along in it, so I’m assuming that they’ve given it a lot of thought during the strike. They know what they’re going to write, the last 30 pages, which is all they need to finish. And so as soon as the strike’s over, I’m assuming they’re going to quickly finish that up. We will do some rewrites.

We’ll go into Hollywood. We’ll find a buyer, maybe we’ll find a couple of buyers, get into a bidding war. And then we’ll come back out and make the announcement that says, ‘We’ve got the funding, the studio, and the production date all lined up. It’s go time.’ We were hoping, minus the strike, that was going to happen this summer, at the latest, this fall.”

Look, we’re not calling McFarlane a man of tall tales, but we’ll believe the Spawn reboot is really happening when it hits theaters. After all, if The Crow can manage to make it out, then there’s every chance another one of superhero cinema’s most cursed retreads can do the same.