Jason Blum Stands by Spawn 2025 Release Date, Says Script They Feel Great About Is Close (Exclusive)
09/29/2023 02:30 pm EDT
Is Todd McFarlane's new Spawn reboot film ever getting made? It's a fair question to ask since the topic has been discussed for the last 26 years since the first Spawn (1997) film came out – and producer Jason Blum is maintaining that he has a concrete answer to give:
The new Spawn movie is coming out in 2025.
"2025 is when Spawn is going to come out," Blum revealed to ComicBook.com during the press junket for The Exorcist: Believer, doubling down on his earlier claims: "I stand by that. I stand by that."
Originally, this new Spawn movie was intended to be a much more low-budget horror-themed imagining of the character. By the mid-2010s, Spawn character and comic book creator Todd McFarlane was parading around a lengthy script for the film, and making it known he intended to direct it as well; Blumhouse took him up on the offer in 2017, and Jamie Foxx was set to play Spawn, but then the reboot suffered several starts an stops as market factors changed things (namely, DC's Joker going from a modest $50-70 million budget project to a billion-dollar box office and Oscars win success story).
However, 2023 brought even more challenges to the film's progress: the Writers' and Actors' Strikes in Hollywood brought all film projects to an indefinite hold; meanwhile, Jamie Foxx suffered a life-threatening health scare that left him hospitalized for weeks. In fact, the Oscar-winning Ray actor is just now starting to return to the public eye after an entire summer where it seemed like his possible death was a trending topic. Now that that's over, things seem like they could proceed fast. Spawn has seen several writers come in to re-work McFarlane's script – which he seems to have taken in stride:
"My original plan has gotten tripped up a bit," McFarlane told ComicBook.com's Chris Killian. "You deal with a lot, given Hollywood. None of that should be surprising. But, you start bringing on A-list people. And we're bringing on A-list people. Not just one, but multiple A-list people. And, it's going to continue to grow... What they're not going to want is to do a cheap, low-budget movie with all of these big-name people on it. That's not why they're signing up. They're not looking for a big extravaganza. But, they're also not looking for an 8 million dollar horror movie budget."
As for tone, McFarlane's last update made it pretty clear what the current version of the Spawn Reboot is going for:
"I think in between [The Boys and a traditional horror movie]. We've got a different group of people on board, and they might not be as darkly bent as I am," McFarlane told us back in July. "If you ask me, I'd make it ugly, dark, make children cry. But the play we're trying for, and we'll see whether it works, and we'll know by the end of this year -- we're taking a pretty big moonshot of what we think we can pull off in Hollywood. If we can pull it off, it will be a big deal, financially, and once you get into those conversations, they're going to want to do it in a way that they can then get their money back."
We'll keep you updated on the Spawn reboot.
Disclosure: ComicBook is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of Paramount. Sign up for Paramount+ by clicking here.
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