I don’t know about you, but I was over the blood moon excited when Spawn and Venom creator Todd McFarlane said that he was teaming with the powers that be over at Blumhouse for an R-rated Spawn reboot starring Jamie Foxx and Jeremy Renner. But then time passed, and it started to look more and more like the movie was too good to be true. And I’m sad to report today that this still seems to be the case for the planned film. Yes, McFarlane just spoke about the movie’s financial issues over at Comic-Con and said that if things don’t shape up soon, he will go ahead and use a crowd-funding platform like Kickstarter to fund his R-rated Spawn movie.
Specifically, Todd McFarlane says this.
“Look, I am relentless. I’m like a dog with a bone. I will get there, I promise you. I will get there. Because I will beat the system. Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll do it as a Kickstarter… and here’s the Kickstarter: I need 20 million people to give me a dollar. And I will make this movie, and when I get the money back, I’ll return the dollar back to you. And you will be my producers, and all I’ll need is the distribution. That’s doable today. I don’t get why Ryan Gosling doesn’t do that for every one of his movies, ‘I need 20 million of you to give me a dollar,’ are you kidding, he’d have it in an hour and could go do his thing! But people in the system are beholden to it, and they have obligations, and the guy on the outside, me, goes ‘I’m only going to give them so much time, and then I’m just going to come up with some crazy idea.”
He then went on to explain why financing is getting held up on the Hollywood end of things. It turns out that everyone who wants to throw some cash his way seems to want the eventual Spawn movie to be a safe PG-13, instead of the hard R motion picture McFarlane has been promising since the beginning. And McFarlane isn’t having any of that, adding:
“I need $20 million to make this movie, I don’t have all of it. I have to ask people for money, and once you ask people for money, they get to have a say in it. Like I said, it’s a little bit of an uphill battle, because again, I just want to do this little dark ‘R’ movie, and they like those PG-13 success movies. There are people on the outside that want to give me money that aren’t in the system. But we’re going to get it done. I’m just trying to play nice, now, but I’m starting to lose my patience. But we’ll try; it’s going to get there one way or another, I promise you. I’m not going to let this one go.”
Hopefully, as time goes on, we have brighter news to report regarding Blumhouse and Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. But until then, this update comes to us from ComicBook.com.
