Let’s be honest, the Spawn movie from the late 90s was nothing special to write home about when you factor in that it was given the kind of rough treatment that one might have expected back then. Superhero movies were starting to make their debut at that point and were even starting to come out as something unique and great, but they hadn’t yet made that jump into being mind-blowing or absolutely impressive just yet. Remember we were a couple of decades away from where we’re at now, and the technology and the story telling had yet to catch up. But as one of the darker and therefore slightly more popular characters in comics one would hope that Spawn would eventually get a lot better treatment than he’s received so far. That seems to be about to change as the new, upcoming Spawn movie is finally starting to gain a bit of ground it sounds like.
Back in the early 90s Spawn’s creator Todd McFarlane was big into Marvel as an artist but he wanted to go a different route and as it’s described by Kristy Ambrose from ScreenRant he went and founded Image comics, where Spawn was created and released in the same year that the company emerged. Spawn was a different kind of hero that many people didn’t know how to take at first since quite honestly he’s a hell-born hero that has powers that stem straight from the underworld and he was supposed to be the commander of a demon army before he revolted against his handler. On top of that his origin doesn’t paint him as a very good guy apart from the fact that he was a decent human being outside his job. In many ways Spawn is one of the most conflicted superheroes out there and he’s been that way since his inception. But despite all that it was believed that bringing him to the big screen might be a piece of cake at first. Unfortunately the cake kind of burned in the oven and had to be tossed out with the trash when all was said and done.
Padraig Cotter from ScreenRant has been kind enough to inform people that Jamie Foxx and Jeremy Renner will be joining the cast for this upcoming movie, and while it still needs a bit of work in regards to the screenplay it does sound as though things are going fairly well with the development. No disrespect to the 90s version but things couldn’t go any worse since that movie was something akin to a walking dumpster fire that someone forgot to put out. Thinking of how this current production could go gives a lot of people some hope that Spawn will finally be represented in the kind of light that he deserves. Does anyone remember that the movie was PG-13? The gore, the swearing, and the overall violence that was so prevalent in the comics had to be toned way down and as a result the movie lost the edge that the character had from the beginning.
As Kirsten Howard from Den of Geek! has found out this new movie is going to be nothing like the cutesy, feelgood movie of the 90s and it’s going to take that hard edge that Spawn has and run it along the nerve endings of the audience in a way that’s going to remind a lot of us what the hero is all about. He’s rarely been nice to anyone and has only ever tolerated a lot of people. Sure he’s had his down moments and those times when he’s actually been decent, but this movie doesn’t sound like it’s going to be about those moments at all. Instead it seems that we’re bound to get something that’s a little more hard-nosed and definitely right up McFarlane’s idea of what Spawn is supposed to be like.
For those of us that were around back then and just getting into the hero when he made his entrance, Spawn was never the cut and dried kind of hero. He was mean, nasty, and drew on a lot of his life experience from before when he was still human. He had to let go of his human side quite a bit in order to survive the perils of being who and what he was, and in order to take down a lot of his enemies he had to fight dirty and he had to be utterly ruthless in order to get it done. That’s the kind of hero that a lot of us were hoping for back in the 90s, not the severely watered-down version that made some folks get up and walk out of the theater. So far it sounds as though the upcoming reboot for Spawn is going to be nothing short of a gruesome, ugly, all out brawl that we should be hoping for.
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