No one really believed that Todd McFarlane was going to find a studio willing to back his Spawn project, have all his demands met, and meet his projected 2019 release date. But that was exactly what happened. McFarlane announced that he had a completed script, and Blumhouse (Get Out, Split, and other gems) quickly accepted his terms and made a deal.

McFarlane subsequently said that the Spawn reboot wouldn’t focus on the Spawn mythology, or even on the character himself. Instead, the film’s would center on Twitch Williams, with Spawn in some way connected with Twitch’s investigations.

During a recent interview with azcentral, the director provided the following production update:

We just signed off on the script, and are going into budgeting. We're also having our casting meeting"¦[The movie] will be dark, heavy, serious, and R-rated. It won't be a superhero movie. I don't think most people would categorize it as that. It will be a supernatural thriller, like a lot of good creep movies. The only thing in the movie that's fantastic is Spawn, and anything else is otherwise normal.

McFarlane had previously compared the movie to Steven Spielberg's Jaws, in the sense that the movie centered on the shark, but the shark couldn’t be considered a main character. The concept appealed to McFarlane, who also said that Spawn wouldn't utter a single word throughout the movie:

It's about the sheriff and the people chasing the ghost. That's it"¦The lead role isn't Spawn, the lead role is a cop, like Sheriff Brody from Jaws. I think we can hook a [certain] fairly significant actor. Unlike a superhero movie, we wouldn't need an actor to put on prosthetic (makeup) or go to the gym. We just need him to act.

Spawn currently lacks a release date, but rumor has it that the film will arrive sometime in 2019.