During my idle surfing I found Spawn on TV over the weekend. After watching a good 15 minutes, I actually wondered to myself, “Who thought making this movie was a good idea?” and then continued to ride my channel wave. Unfortunately, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane hasn’t let go of his superhero like everyone else has and he is still pushing for the sequel, according to MTV.com.
It’s a case of an artist who is too in love with his work. The interview with MTV is long and mostly pointless as McFarlane waxes intellectual about a superhero from hell. The gist of his jabbering is that the new Spawn movie will be a reboot, following the trends of other successful comic book movie resurrections (e.g. Batman Begins). But I’ll leave it to McFarlane to explain:
“Right, I'd call this more of a suspense thriller. I'm going to use a big example which may seem sort of loopy, but to me it's closer to Jaws in that — and this is one of the problems that some of the studios had — Spawn won't talk. He's just a being in this movie — which again, some people may find odd — but, you know, Jaws didn't talk a hell of a lot in his movie either,” McFarlane says triumphantly. “But you knew that when he came out, something was going to happen. You know what I mean? You've made the presence known enough that nothing good was going to come of his presence being there.”
“So it's sort of the same concept. I'm not going for Freddy Krueger horror and I'm not going for Spider-Man action superhero. I'm not even going for a guy who's going to sit there and talk. You're never actually ever going to see him in his cape or costume in any kind of direct light. It's just going to be this thing that's just going to come, and if it's there then buddy, you're going to have a bad day.”
So, we’ll never actually see Spawn…. To my recollection, we saw the shark in Jaws quite a bit, unless McFarlane never made it past the 20 minute mark. But Spawn is just going to be this being that we sense? Or maybe the hero or anti-hero of the film will shoot spawn full of a couple oxygen-filled, yellow barrels that will make him visible. So I take it that McFarlane isn’t quite going for the die-hard comic book fans with this one:
“My 15-year-old daughter and her friends like to go to spooky movies, and they'll go and see The Hills Have Eyes and 1408 [because] they like to get spooked. So what does ["Spawn 2"] have to look like to get that group? Because if I can get that group, then [I can] get any group,” he explains. “I mean, that means it's a broad enough movie idea in which you don't also have to know anything about "Spawn" prior to walking in there. You don't have to have any knowledge, and it won't slow down the ride.”
I think that says enough about McFarlane’s mindset when it comes to his “upcoming” Spawn sequel. I could go on quoting the entire interview because McFarlane is clearly off his rocker. He calls the Spawn sequel his “Passion of the Anti-Christ” and then goes onto compare it to Crash and 300. God help that man.
