You may have already heard that a Spawn reboot is finally going to happen, but don't expect it to follow in the footsteps of other modern tentpole superhero movies.
A brief five years after his Image Comics introduction, Al Simmons, aka Spawn, got a standalone live-action movie starring Michael Jai White. Unfortunately, the $40 million project secured a dismal Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 18 percent, and brought in just $87.8 million worldwide.
Creator Todd McFarlane has been teasing a reboot for almost a decade, and Blumhouse Productions finally announced that they’d given the project the green light at 2017's San Diego Comic-Con International. They also announced that McFarlane will write the script and direct.
Spawn fans are excited about the reboot, but they shouldn’t expect it to be a high-budget project. Producer Jason Blum recently told Collider that they will spend quite a bit less than the typical superhero movie:
This Spawn movie is a kind of superhero movie, but a very different kind of feeling superhero movie. I like the idea of low-budget superhero movies. It's cool.
The average budget for a Blumhouse movie rarely exceeds $10 million, so this is no surprise. However, even with their bargain basement budgets, several of their films have brought in over $200 million, including this year's Split ($276.9 million) and Get Out ($252.4 million). Of course, it’s going to be difficult to add the visual effects that a Spawn movie deserves with that kind of budget.
Asked whether the movie will draw from a particular comic book story arc, the producer responded:
Yeah, for sure. Todd [McFarlane] is doing it. He's directing it, which is very cool, so we definitely will.
Although McFarlane hasn't mentioned a specific story arc, he did suggest that the R-rated reboot would be inspired to a certain extent by Jaws and The Wolf of Wall Street.