Jamie Foxx Set For Spawn Creator Todd McFarlanes Dark Blumhouse Adaptation

EXCLUSIVE: Jamie Foxx is set to star in Spawn, the Blumhouse film that marks the directorial debut of Todd McFarlane from his scripted adaptation of his comic book creation. Foxx will play the character who started out in the comics as Al Simmons, a member of a CIA black ops team who is betrayed twice. After being set up by his cohorts to be murdered with his corpse set aflame, Newman is double crossed in Hell. He is convinced to become a Hellspawn warrior in exchange for being able to be reunited with his wife. But Spawn finds himself stuck in a demonic creature shell, and that his wife moved on and married his best friend. So this is one pissed-off antihero who attends to dispatching the scum of the city in good and evil battles that encompass Earth, Heaven and Hell.

The comic was huge in the 1990s and was previously turned into an animated film and a live-action pic with Michael Jai White playing the character. McFarlane has long gotten overtures on a new live-action film that could launch a franchise, but he always had creative issues that led him to his own gritty low-budget version at Blumhouse. He expects the budget to be between $10 million-$12 million for a dark R-rated realization of his vision that will stack up favorably from both a creative and financial standpoint.

He doesn't intend to tell Spawn's origin story and he expects his anti-hero to be a man of few words.

'The scariest movies, from Jaws to John Carpenter's The Thing, or The Grudge and The Ring, the boogeyman doesn't talk,' McFarlane told Deadline, acknowledging that he's gotten odd stares from studio suits in the past on this approach. 'It confuses people because of the comic book industry, and because they all default into their Captain America mindset and I keep saying, no, get into John Carpenter's mindset or Hitchcock. This is not a man in a rubber suit, it's not a hero that's going to come and save the damsel. It's none of that. At the end of the movie, I'm hoping that the audience will say either, is this a ghost that turns into a man, or is it a man that turns into a ghost' I've got a trilogy in mind here, and I'm not inclined in this first movie to do an origin story. I'm mentally exhausted from origin stories. Luckily, there's a movie that just came out that helps my cause. In A Quiet Place, the first thing on screen is a card in black and white letters that says Day 89. It doesn't care about what happened in those first 88 days. There are a couple headlines, but then we are on day 450. That movie doesn't worry about explaining and giving all the answers. What it said in that case was, if you can hang on for a story of survival of this family, this movie will make complete sense for you.'

McFarlane wants to challenge Spawn aficionados and newcomers in the same fashion. 'If you want to see something creepy and powerful where you go, just what the hell was that' I'm not going to explain how Spawn does what he does; he is just going to do it. We'll eventually do some of the background if we make a trilogy, but that's not this first movie. The first movie is just saying, do you believe' And if you believe than that's good because I'm hoping to take you for a long ride with this franchise.'

McFarlane expects the envelope-pushing take might turn his biggest fans into his most ferocious critics. If there's a touchstone film to his approach, it's Jacob's Ladder, a film that left audiences questioning whether or not the action on the screen was real or a nightmare.

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