Spawn, as a movie, was of questionable quality. It deserves points for at least trying to do right by the comic, but it’s still a movie with John Leguizamo in a fat suit. Todd McFarlane has been claiming an Oscar winner wants the role for the script he’s writing for a while, now, and said Oscar winner may have finally outed himself as Jamie Foxx.
Foxx pretty much admitted it during an interview with Movies.com:
“Spawn is one, yeah. And Mike Tyson. Those are two roles I would just love to do. I’m aggressively pursuing them,”
You know what? Yeah, that could work. That could work pretty well.
It’s not often discussed, but Spawn, first of all, is one of the few Black superheroes who’s genuinely relevant. Not to knock Black Lightning or Luke Cage, but Spawn’s still selling toys and is still in print, with plenty of spin-offs and the like.
Secondly, despite being associated with the worst of ’90s comic book speculator excess, Spawn really was an attempt to do something different. A homeless superhero is a concept that’s fairly edgy in of itself, and the fact that Spawn was essentially selling pieces of his soul to be the good guy is something a good actor can work with. A good actor like Jamie Foxx, for example.
Finally, unlike the 1997 movie, there’s no associations anymore. Part of the reason the movie is seen as a bomb even though it actually made decent money was that the expectations tied to it at the time were utterly insane. The idea that Spawn was going to put as many asses in seats as Batman was excessively optimistic. There’s a small core of die-hards, but Foxx and McFarlane will mostly be free to make a superhero movie the way they want to, and apparently the intent is to make it a hard R horror film.
You know what? Yes. If Foxx and McFarlane want to do something different, and are willing to bring in a director who can follow through, then we want to see it.