The Script for Blumhouse's R-Rated Spawn Reboot Still Isn’t Ready Yet
"It's just not going as fast as I hoped."
At the 2024 New York Comic-Con, Blumhouse unveiled their upcoming slate of movies for the next year, with the horror studio set to release a whopping 10 movies in 2025. The slate included highly anticipated films like M3GAN 2.0, Wolf Man, Black Phone 2, Conjuring 4, and Monkey, but notably missing was Spawn.
The long-gestating reboot of the dark Todd McFarlane superhero had previously been set for a 2025 release after years of setbacks and delays, but Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum confirms to Inverse that the studio’s Spawn movie has been delayed once again.
“The script isn't going as fast as I hoped,” Blum tells Inverse. “We got a script, we're still doing work on the script. It's just not going as fast as I hoped, so it won't be coming out in '25.”
Jason Blum announcing Blumhouse’s slate of films for 2025 at New York Comic-Con.
While this is a bummer, Blum’s answer at least confirms that the Spawn movie still isn’t dead. The reboot has been in the works since 2016, when McFarlane first began teasing a new cinematic project based on his comic book series. McFarlane hyped up this reboot as an R-rated adaptation, unlike 1997’s heavily lampooned PG-13 Spawn starring Michael Jai White.
McFarlane completed a script for the Spawn reboot in 2017, but the film has gone through several rewrites since then, with the most recent done by Scott Silver, Malcolm Spellman, and Matthew Mixon. McFarlane is set to direct the film with Jamie Foxx starring as the demonic anti-hero, although no other cast members have been confirmed.
Created by McFarlane in 1992, Spawn follows a mercenary named Albert Francis "Al" Simmons, who dies and goes to Hell for his crimes. He makes a deal with a demon to become a hellspawn and reemerges on Earth with supernatural powers and hideous scars. Spawn then uses his powers to stop evil and atone for his sins, becoming an unlikely anti-hero.
With Blumhouse’s Spawn once again on the backburner and Marvel’s Blade, starring Mahershala Ali, delayed indefinitely, things aren’t looking great for Black-led superhero movies. That’s a shame, since the 1997 Spawn, as critically ill-regarded as it is, was one of the first major comic book films to feature a Black lead. No one wants to see a bad script get rushed out, but it’s still disappointing to see Spawn have so much trouble getting back on the big screen.
