The definition of failure – and insanity, for that matter – largely revolves around repeating the same mistakes over and over again while ignoring an identical outcome. With that in mind, Todd McFarlane should at least be commended for his dedication to rebooting Spawn, if nothing else.
The 1997 original wasn’t a catastrophic flop, but it did earn less than $90 million at the box office on a budget hovering around the $50 million mark, while respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 17 and 36 percent from critics and crowds paint the picture of an ambitious misfire that was arguably slightly ahead of its time, but hasn’t held up particularly well.
Nonetheless, McFarlane has spent no less than a quarter of a century doing his damndest to try and bring the cult favorite antihero back to the big screen, even if he’s been the only person talking it up for large stretches of that time. As far as we’ve been led to believe, it’s still on the cards with Jamie Foxx remaining attached to the title role, but that was the exact same case in May of 2018.
Either way, streaming subscribers are biding their time between the creator’s semi-regular updates that don’t tend to go anywhere by revisiting the brutally violent R-rated actioner in their numbers on streaming, with FlixPatrol touting Spawn as one of the top-viewed movies on Max’s worldwide watch-list so far this week.
Whenever the reinvention does come along, the reactions will inevitably be partially driven by relief, because we finally won’t have to keep hearing the “it’s still happening!” party line being repeated over and over again.
