Todd McFarlane Reveals Never-Before-Seen Spawn Movie Concept Art (Exclusive)

Todd McFarlane has spent a lot of years since 1997 trying to get another live-action Spawn movie off the ground, and the character has gotten some pretty wild ideas for adaptation along the way. 

ComicBook.com’s The Collectibles Show got to visit McFarlane Studios recently – Todd McFarlane’s production house, workshop and and personal playland. Of the many, many, wonders of geek and pop-culture history that host Chris Krillian saw, one of the most memorable (for better or worse) were the alternate designs for Spawn that some movie-makers considered going with! 

As you can see in the video above, the concept art for these Spawn movie characters to some VERY big detours away from Todd McFarlane’s artwork in the comic books – concepts even McFarlane describes as being “funky ideas.” McFarlane described the “organic” look that a lot of movie-makers wanted to go with for Spawn, with some concepts going as far as looking like something out of the Alien franchise, with its horrific take on what forms “organic life” can take. 

Even more striking are the concepts for Spawn’s first nemesis Violator and his alter-ego the Clown. The concepts ranged from very comic-accurate versions of violator, to versions that look like the belong in legitimate serial killer and/or horror films. Not so much the lovable rascal version of Violator, played by John Leguizamo in the original film…. 

New Line Cinema is name-dropped as the studio that was entertaining some of these particular designs, but no breakdown on the artists was given – and really, at this point, that info is probably lost to obscurity. WATCH the FULL VIDEO interivew with Todd McFarlane below: 

No doubt a lot of Spawn fans’ eyes are going to gravitate toward the more horror-themed designs in artwork portfolio we see here. The 1997 Spawn film went with a superhero blockbuster movie approach – or at least what qualified as a “superhero blockbuster” at that time. Most subsequent discussions of a Spawn reboot film have angled toward the hope that it is much more of a supernatural-horror film than a “superhero” film; for his part, Todd McFarlane has spent over a decade pitching and developing the project as a mystery-horror film, with series policemen Sam and Twitch investigating what turns out to be the demonic figure of Spawn. That film is still currently in development, with Blumhouse Pictures in the scripting stages, as of earlier this year.