Todd McFarlane and Greg Nicotero to Team Up Again on New Spawn Film
More than 20 years after the original film, Todd McFarlane and Greg Nicotero will reunite for Spawn. Nicotero’s KNB EFX Group has officially signed on to be a part of the new film. Per an exclusive ComicBook.com story, McFarlane is said to favor practical effects in the new film rather than CGI. “When I conceived of the story to start with, I never really thought of it as big special effects extravaganza because I knew we weren’t going to have the budget for it.”
“So I knew I was going to rely heavily on practical makeup and costuming, and one of the places that kept popping up was my good pal Greg Nicotero on his KNB Group. And he’s obviously done a tremendous amount of work on dozens and dozens of movies. The sort of serendipitous part of it is that Greg was there at the beginning 20 years ago for the original Spawn movie.”
Nicotero is excited for the project, and looking forward to working with McFarlane again. “Spawn has always been a fascinating character study, and I really think that Todd’s whole take on this is he really wants to be able to define superhero movies in a very different context than everybody is accustomed to.”
New Film New Look
McFarlane has emphasized that this film will have a different look than the original. “I think it would be a mistake for people to go, ‘Oh, it’s going to look like the first movie.’ No. That’s not the task nor is that sort of where we’re at creatively.”
The pair have spent a little over a month working on the design. “So when I sat down with Greg and his staff, I just said, ‘Here’s what I see visually.’ I gave them some reference at some images throughout the 25-year history of Spawn that I thought was close to what I was talking about. And then I just stepped back and let them start taking a whack at it.”
Nicotero added “It was a really fun … We spent about six weeks coming up with some concept art, and designing the character, and a lot of it was kind of getting to the roots of what he’s about. He’s this sort of part feral animal, driven completely by this rage that he has, and he really embraced the idea of getting the sense of how much we want to see of this character, and what we want the audience to see.”
McFarlane is said to be meeting with studios soon, but no production dates have been set. Jamie Foxx will star as the lead, with Jeremy Renner stepping in as Detective ‘Twitch’ Williams. The film is set to be released sometime in theaters in 2019.
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