Jamie Foxx will star in R-rated "Spawn" reboot

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Jamie Foxx will star in R-rated "Spawn" reboot

Writer: Naseem Randhawa

Will Jamie Foxx be a good fit for Spawn?

30 May - If you've seen 1997's "Spawn", forget everything about that because the comic book film is getting a do over thanks to Blumhouse Productions.

The studio responsible for great horror flicks like "Get Out", "The Purge" and "Split", has got "Spawn" creator Todd McFarlane to make his directorial debut with the R-rated antihero film starring Hollywood A-lister Jamie Foxx in the title role.

Foxx is set to play a member of a CIA black ops team, Al Simmons, who has been betrayed by his group. Having been murdered and his corpse set to flames, he ends up in Hell where he makes a deal to be a Hellspawn warrior so that he can be reunited with his wife. Stuck in a demonic shell, he then becomes a bitter antihero caught in the battle between Heaven and Hell.

No stranger to comic book films, Foxx previously played supervillain Electro in 2014's "The Amazing Spider-Man".

According to Deadline, McFarlane doesn't want to make another Spawn origin story. Taking a page out of the recent horror flick, "A Quiet Place", he wants the pace of the story to be immediately established adding that Spawn will be a man of few words.

"The scariest movies, from "Jaws" to John Carpenter's "The Thing", or "The Grudge" and "The Ring", [is] the boogeyman doesn't talk."

McFarlane also adds that if all goes well, he is looking to make two more "Spawn" films.

"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."

"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."

In picking Foxx for the role, McFarlane says that the "Django Unchained" star came to his office five years ago with an idea for a movie, and since then he always had him in mind while writing the script.

Back in 1997, "Spawn" was directed and co-written by Mark A.Z. Dippe and starred Michael Jai White as the lead. It was the first film to portray an African American actor as a major comic book superhero.

Receiving generally negative reviews from critics, the movie grossed USD87 million worldwide against its production budget of USD40 million.

Cinema Online, 30 May 2018